The Third Bullet - Страница 5

“Let me put it before you in a different way, all right? I think you’re missing something, and I think your husband missed it and Floyd missed it, all the way back to the Engineer. That thing you all missed is Texas. Texas is gun country. You may have to explain why you have a gun in Baltimore, but you sure don’t in Texas. Everyone has a gun in Texas. They have ’em to wear to barbecues or the opera or the swim meet. Nobody blinks an eye, and that was especially true down there then, before JFK. Nobody thought a thing about a gun. It just was, that’s all. The presence of a gun in that building isn’t remarkable. In fact, it’s nothing. I can think of a hundred reasons for a gun in that building other than killing a president. Maybe some boys were heading out for deer season straight from work. Save time, get there opening-day morning. They brought their rifles in, and one of them knew his needed cleaning, so he does the job. Nobody says a thing because it ain’t remarkable. He leans the gun in a corner and it rubs up against somebody’s coat. When that guy gets his coat, he sees it’s ruined, it goes into the wastebasket, and later that night the janitor finds it and decides to scavenge it. He hangs it up to dry out, but Hoppe’s being powerful, the stink never does go away. So he stuffs it somewhere, meaning to check it out later, and forgets about it. Years later, the elevator people discover it. That could have happened not just for deer season but in pheasant season too, as they kill a lot of them birds down there, and doves and pigeons and anything that flies. So you have found the suggestion of a gun in a building in Texas, and it surprises you only because you don’t know guns or Texas.”

“I see,” she said.

“Ma’am-Jean, if I may-you’ve got what the Marine Corps would call intelligence that doesn’t rise to the actionable level. It doesn’t carry enough meaning to be acted on. There are too many other possibilities here for anyone to do anything about it. My best advice is to congratulate yourself for following up on your duty to your husband and then go back to your life. I think your husband would have found that out in time too. Maybe he could do something with his discovery if it were a fiction book, but I don’t see it as having any real meaning in the world, and it sure didn’t have anything to do with his death. Sorry to be so blunt, but you didn’t come all this way and invest all this time for sugarcoating.”

“No, I didn’t, Mr. Swagger. I believe you’ve set me straight.”

“I hope I helped, ma’am. And I’m very sorry about your husband. Maybe by the time you get back, they will have caught the boy.”

“Maybe so.”

“Let me walk you to your car, and we’ll get you out of this godforsaken place.”

“Thank you.”

They both rose as he peeled off a few bills for the waitress and headed out to her Fusion.

“I guess we’ll never know,” she said as she got to her car, “who ran over the mystery man with a bicycle.”

He was only half listening at this time, trying to sneak a look at his watch to see what time it was and how soon he could get back, because he’d promised to help Miko on her low-roping skills and-

“I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?”

“Oh, the back of the coat, it had a smear on it that appeared to represent a tread. The Engineer thought it could have been from an English bike, you know, thin-wheeled. It was an impression, about an inch long, where it looked like a tread mark had been printed. That’s all. A minor point, I forgot to-”

“Do you have a list of the people your husband visited?”

“I have his notebook. It’s hard to read, but it does have some names and addresses there. Why, what is-”

“I have to set some things up. It’ll take me a week. I want you to go home and find that notebook and FedEx it to me. If he had computer files on the Dallas trip or notepapers, get me that stuff too. I’ll get down there as soon as I’m set up.”

“Do you want to borrow the tommy gun?”

“No, not yet.”

“You’re not joking, are you?”

“No ma’am.”

“Do you want me to help defray the expenses? I mean, I seem to be wealthy now, and I-”

“No ma’am,” said Swagger. “This one’s on me.”

CHAPTER 3

A man sat on a park bench at the corner of Houston and Elm, under a spread of aged oak trees, before some kind of odd rectangular white cement ceremonial pool that appeared to be full of Scope. Around him, la vie touristique occurred, a subspecies of human behavior mandating that small knots of oddly dressed people congregated here and there, with cameras inadequate to the scale of the urban space, called Dealey, which they commanded. It was all very strange. Sometimes a particularly brave one would dash onto Elm Street to stand, during a brief traffic interruptus, at one of two X’s that marked the spots on which a man had been shot to death. Meanwhile, homeless men roamed, some to beg, some to sell for five bucks a rag called The Conspiracy Chronicles that promised the latest dish on 11-22-63.

Directly across Elm from the man stood a box of bricks seven stories tall, undistinguished but famous, called the Texas Book Depository. Despite its banality, it had one of the most recognizable facades in the world, especially a corner of the sixth floor where the ambusher had lurked fifty years ago. The sky was bold Texas blue, and a slight wind blew east to west across the territory, which was surrounded by the churn of cars and trucks as they cascaded down Houston and made the tricky turn to the left down Elm for the access to the Stemmons Freeway just beyond the triple underpass. People had things to do, places to go, and for most Dallasites, the tragedy of Dealey Plaza had long since faded. Swagger sat alone, but in his mind, it was 1963, 24/7.

He looked this way and that, up and down, around, down streets, at his shoes, at his fingertips, and he tried to remember. It had been a day like this one, cloudless after a threat of early rain, the sky as blue as a movie star’s eyes. At least that’s what the papers said. He himself had been asleep at the time, half a world away on an island called Okinawa where, as a seventeen-year-old lance corporal, he’d just made the battalion rifle team and would spend the next three weeks cradling a ton of Garand on a flat, dry firing range, trying to put holes in black circles six hundred yards or so off. He didn’t know a goddamn thing about anything and wouldn’t for years.

But at 12:29 p.m., back in Dallas, the president’s motorcade turned right off of Main Street and proceeded one block up Houston, at the northern boundary of the triangular open park that was Dealey Plaza. Now he saw it. Lincoln limo, long black boat of a car. Two up front, driver and agent, two lower, Governor Connally and his wife, then the regal couple, the blessed, the charismatic, John F. Kennedy in his suit and his wife, Jackie, in pink, both waving at the close-by crowds.

The car reached Elm and cranked left. It had to access the Stemmons Freeway, which could only be entered from Elm. It was a 120-degree turn, not a 90-degree turn, so the driver, a Secret Service agent named Greer, had to slow down considerably as he maneuvered the heavy vehicle around the corner. Speeding up, he passed by some trees and continued on a slight downward angle along Elm Street. Immediately to his right was the seven-story building known as the Texas Book Depository, the undistinguished pile of plain brickwork that now loomed over Swagger. He ran his eyes up its edge and halted them at the corner of the sixth floor and saw. . only a window.

On that day, at 12:30 p.m., as the car passed by the trees, a sound that virtually everyone agreed was a gunshot was heard. It appeared to have struck nobody directly, but at least one witness, a man named Tague, reported being stung by what can reasonably be assumed was a fragment, as the bullet broke apart when it hit the curbstone behind the car or a branch in the trees. Bullets do this; it is not strange or remarkable. Within six or so seconds, a second bullet was fired, and most people there assumed it came from the looming depository. That bullet hit the president in the back, near the neck, tumbled through his body, emerged from his throat, nicking his tie, and flew on to hit John Connally horizontally. It penetrated his body entirely too, hit and broke his wrist, and thudded into but did not penetrate his thigh. It was found later that afternoon on a gurney at the hospital. This was the “magic bullet” that many claimed could not have done what this one did.

The third bullet was the head shot, a few seconds later (how many would be legendarily unclear) delivered at a distance of 263 feet from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository. It hit the president high in the back of the head on a downward angle. It appears to have disintegrated or detonated, as the few traces of its existence are controversial at best. It blew a large chunk of brain out of the skull, exiting in a burst of vaporized material that jetted or exploded from the right side of the head.

Chaos ensued. The limousine raced off to the hospital, with its cargo of two gravely wounded men and their women. Police moved, perhaps not quickly enough, to cordon off the building from which the shots seemed to have been fired. In time, after a roll was taken, police learned that an employee named Lee Harvey Oswald was missing, though he had been seen there that day and was even confronted by a police officer in the lunchroom right after the shooting.

A description of Oswald was broadcast, and some miles away, in Dallas’s Oak Cliff section, an officer named J. D. Tippit spotted a man who matched that description. Tippit stopped and called him over. He got out of his car and was shot four times by the suspect and died on the spot.