The Third Bullet - Страница 8

If that was the thing that did it, he’d have to know more about it. He resolved to acquire and study such a piece-they were available dirt cheap, usually under three hundred or so. Could he learn the bolt throw, could he find a target fast through that little four-power, not particularly clean scope, could the rifle sustain its accuracy over a string of shots, could that improvised sling improve the accuracy, if indeed Oswald, who knew of slings from the Marine Corps, applied it during his shooting? All yet to be discovered.

Swagger tired of the place. No big deal, no emotional reaction to the foreign visitors, the running kids, the goofball Ohio tourists; it was just enough, and was time to go.

Now, the grassy knoll. It was a kind of absurd conceit, a mock Greek temple etched into a grass hillside along a busy commercial road in the heart of the city. Someone’s long-ago idea of class, when the Greek model was beloved and appreciated in America. But it looked like something out of an ancient Rome movie, and you half expected to see people lounging around in togas.

Swagger stood to the side of the circle of columns at the height of the crest and tried not to think of togas; he considered the angles. Below him, maybe fifty feet, cars rushed down Elm toward the triple underpass. The slope of grass ran down to the curbside, the road itself fed the commuters onto the Stemmons Freeway, and beyond that stretched the field, also pool-table green, of Dealey Plaza.

Here, the shooting was so close. Some kind of professional hard-core hit team without access to the TBD, which loomed to the left through some thin trees, almost certainly would have chosen this spot. They could yank subguns-grease guns, Thompsons, Schmeissers, all the common war bring-backs plentiful in the America of 1963-and lay down a fusillade that no man could survive. Then they could race off and try to gunfight their way to freedom, but they’d fail, enough police would arrive eventually, and they’d die of extreme ventilation of the twelve-gauge variety at some roadblock a few miles away.

But one shooter, knowing he had to hit cold-bore on his first shot to syncopate with the patsy Oswald’s sure misses? He couldn’t make any sense of it. I came here for answers, Swagger thought. All I am getting is more questions.

Still, like all the other rubes, he moseyed down the hill and stood at the curb not seven feet from the X that marked the position of the car when the third bullet hit head. He’d seen it enough to view it with dispassion, but unbidden, a sound cue came to him. He had been near men hit in the head, and he knew that it was a sound like no other on the planet. He didn’t want to, but from some forgotten atrocity in his long and violent past, that noise abruptly reproduced itself. It sounded like a baseball bat hitting a grapefruit, as it held both the thud of power and the squirt of liquefaction. Vapor was left in the air, a cloud of atomized brain particles thick enough to register on Zapruder’s film before it dissipated in the rush of the car accelerating away.

Swagger shook his head. He hadn’t expected that moment of horror. He tried to clear his brain. He turned, looked up Elm to the cube of the depository with its front of mismatched windows, arc and square and arc and square, now lacking the gaudy Hertz sign that had commanded the heights in 1963, and he saw Lee Harvey’s window 288 feet away and 66 feet off the ground. But he saw another thing. He waited until a traffic light at the corner halted the stream so he was able to walk the seven feet to the X and turn and look back.

The other thing he saw was a building. It was also a brick box, and it was just across Houston from the depository. From this angle, its seventh-story window was but a few feet to the right of Oswald’s nest. Any fair computerized trajectory cone, imprecise to begin with, would have included it too.

It was the Dal-Tex Building.

Because the writer had spent an afternoon there, Swagger next found himself in the local history room of the Dallas Public Library on Young Street a few blocks from his hotel on Commerce. The library itself, which seemed to match City Hall across the street, appeared to resemble a spaceship crashed into the earth. It was a kind of inverted or upside-down pyramid thing, and each floor addressed the world through a line of wide, deep windows. It was so old-fashioned modern.

The room on the fifth floor was any other library room, in fact nicer than most, and the young woman behind the counter couldn’t have been nicer herself. Swagger was following James Aptapton’s notebook and explained that he’d like to see the Dallas Yellow Pages from 1963, and in seconds, literally under a minute, he was sitting at a table with a copy of the Dallas Yellow pages, not merely from 1963 but from November 1963.

As serious research, it was probably pointless. But he saw that the writer would use it as a source by which to re-create the city of 1963. It probably helped him if he knew what the cab companies called themselves, where you took your dry cleaning or went to meet your refrigeration or photography needs, where you’d go to get a nice tan overcoat, what the phone number of the Texas Book Depository was (RI7-3521) or that there were eight pages of churches but only one strip club-Jack Ruby’s Carousel, “across from the Adolphus.” He learned that you could eat Mex at El Fenix or buy liquor from a Mr. Sigel, who had stores everywhere, or stay at the Statler Hilton or the Mayfair or the Cabana as well as the Adolphus; buy a straight-up drink at the Tabu Room or the Star Bar or the Lazy Horse Lounge; buy ammo for your gun at Ketchum and Killum on Kleist, in Oak Cliff, or Wald’s; buy a book at the North Dallas Book Center, hear a song on KBOX or KJET or KNOK. Yes, a storyteller might find all this interesting, but it quickly drained Swagger of interest and his eyes glazed over in a bit. He hung around on sheer willpower, so that he traced exactly the writer’s footsteps.

Leaving, he hailed a cab. African cabdriver with a little magic box for getting directions, so the fellow had him on his way to 1026 North Beckley, in Oak Cliff, in seconds. That destination was noted in Aptapton’s little book, and Swagger knew it to be the location of Oswald’s roominghouse in the six weeks before the assassination. A writer would have to see such a thing and know for sure, as Swagger soon learned, that it was a wooden box under trees with a scruffy yard off the main drag of Zang Boulevard, that it had a mansard roof concealing what had to be a small upper story, that it was deep, probably much bigger than it seemed from North Beckley Street, containing many small rooms, one of which had housed the creepy young killer. Nothing marked its place in history. It sat among other decaying wooden houses on a block that seemed to be slipping into disrepair and possibly into something he had never heard of until he started reading-that is, existential despair. It held no mysteries for Swagger.

He directed Mr. Ruranga to drive farther down Beckley to Tenth, for that was the route of Oswald’s last walk as a free man. Oswald had thundered down Beckley with seemingly no direction in mind, then turned on a street called Crowley, which led him to another turn down Tenth. Swagger had forgotten Crowley and settled for Tenth. When they reached it, it turned out not to go through, so the driver had to mull around until he found a way around the church parking lot that now barricaded it. That route led to the bleak street where Oswald had been confronted by the police officer, right before the corner of Tenth and Patton, and Oswald had hit three of his four shots, all fatal. No plaque marked J. D. Tippit’s falling place among the rotting bungalows and uncut lawns, just a whisper as dry leaves caught in the persistent Texas wind rushing over the earth. It seemed so wrong.

Then it was a brief shot up Oak Cliff’s main drag, called Jefferson, to the low strip of commercial buildings that held the Texas Theatre. The theater was still there and still called Texas and recognizable from a million reproductions of photos taken at 2:30 p.m., November 22, 1963, when the surly young man with the snub-nosed.38 Special was taken down by Dallas Homicide, getting a shiner in the process. In retrospect, he was damned lucky he didn’t get a.357 in the thoracic cavity, as the Dallas cops in those days weren’t particularly merciful to cop killers.

Again, the theater held no fascination for Swagger. It was just an old building, and its deco stylings spoke thirties, not sixties, and its marquee in Spanish suggested that a new wave of inheritors had moved in.

Swagger ordered the cab back to the Adolphus, because it was, happily, nap time.

The nap never arrived. Not even with lights out and shades down would sleep approach. Too much danced in his brain.

Conspiracy theory. Second shooter. Third shooter. Triangulation of fire. All that Oliver Stone stuff. How could you think about this thing at all with all the crap around it? You couldn’t see the target, there was so much camouflage, some of it deceitful, some of it well meant, some of it earnest, some of it crazy. CIA. Castro. From deep within the government. The trilateral commission.

He told himself: Think hard. Think straight. Concentrate.

Could there have been a second gunman elsewhere in Dealey? How do you attack that proposition? There was no reason why there couldn’t have been one, from a gunman with a rifle in his umbrella to a guy on top of the TBD to someone on one of the other buildings that ringed the square, Dal-Tex or the Records Building or even the Criminal Courts Building.

But. . What am I missing?