The Third Bullet - Страница 9

What am I missing?

He had nothing. Then he had something.

Most if not all of the multiple shooter/grassy knoll theorists proceeded from a fundamental lack of rigor, under false assumptions. Most assumed, sloppily, that what became known on November 22, 1963, was known before that. It was not. You have to discipline yourself, when thinking about this shit, to limit your thoughts to what was known on November 22 and not after. Most of them had not been able to do that.

There was one unassailable fact: only one bullet was found that could be associated with the murder of John F. Kennedy. That is what is called an anomaly. Swagger knew from too much experience that many shootings feature anomalies: things that could not be predicted, that could not be expected, that were seemingly impossible. Yet they happened, because reality does not care what people think or expect.

No sane planner could have assumed that only one bullet would be found, WC399, the later-to-be-famous “magic bullet.” Any planner utilizing multiple shooters (i.e., personnel on the grassy knoll) would have to assume that bullets from their firearms would be recovered as well. The odds certainly favored that outcome. If that was the fact, why bother to use Lee Harvey Oswald as a “patsy”? Why not do the job straight out, like a Mob hit, and make a break for it after the last shot? Why not use an automatic or a semi-automatic weapon and put a burst on target instead of three shots separated by several seconds each? A good man with a Thompson at the grassy knoll could have killed everyone in that car in two seconds. The only reason to have a single shot fired from the knoll was the false-flag operation, to set up a chump. Why would you do that if your own assumed-to-be-recovered bullet would give that away quickly? The deceit that Oswald was the only shooter would last, it had to be assumed, until an autopsy surgeon removed a bullet from JFK’s brain, or Mrs. Kennedy’s left shoulder, or John Connally’s lung, or the upholstery of the limo.

Any “other-shooter scenario” without some kind of ballistic deceit, meant to link whatever really happened with Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano 38, was utterly dismissible on its face. It was even surprising that such craziness wasn’t laughed off the face of the earth when it was first theorized, though nobody in the press knew enough about rifle ballistics to catch on.

He sat back. That seemed solid. He looked at it a thousand ways and couldn’t see through it or around it. It was okay.

Progress? Maybe a little.

And tomorrow. To make sure it was there, he picked up the Aptapton notebook and noted what the writer had inscribed in a careful hand: “National Institute of Assassination Research, 2805 N. Crenshaw.”

CHAPTER 4

As is true of many grandly named enterprises, the National Institute of Assassination Research was located in somebody’s basement. The house was shabby, with shedding shingles, in another decaying Dallas prewar bungalow neighborhood, a one-story wreck that hadn’t seen paint or putty in too many years. The glass-and-steel spires of New Dallas seemed a long way away from this broken-down zone. As Swagger walked through the gate in the cyclone fence on a sidewalk smeared with wet leaves, he noted a sign that said “Bookstore in Back.” He followed that around and found a stairway down to another sign that instructed him to “Ring Bell,” which he did.

“Come on in, it’s open,” came a shout.

He walked into a room jammed to bulging with bookshelves, all of them ominously creaky and distended from load-bearing responsibility as their fibers struggled with the tonnage of pages they were asked to contain, the whole thing musty and basement-smelling. The shelves were indexed by handwritten-on-tape topic labels: CIA, RUSSIA, RIFLE, LHO EARLY, LHO LATE, WARREN COMMISSION PRO, WARREN COMMISSION CON, DOCUMENTS, WITNESS ACCOUNTS, FBI, JACK RUBY, and so on and so forth. Bob looked for one called DAL-TEX, but didn’t see it. He moseyed, unmonitored for a good deal of time, pulling this or that tattered paperback from a shelf, tracking the conspiracy theories from Mafia to KGB to Castro to MI–Complex to Big Oil to Far Right, none of them particularly motivating.

The stuff felt like an undertow; it could suck you in and in minutes you were annealed into the gel of conspiracy, your clarity gone, your logic-gyro hopelessly out of whack, your ability to distinguish this from that eroded into nothingness. Too much information; which of it was trustworthy, which dubious? Too many claims and assertions, too much speculation, some out-and-out lies for profit. In all, as if some madhouse virus of paranoia had been set loose, infecting all who breathed it.

“Hi, there,” a voice said. “Sorry, I was trying to catch up on shipping. Can I help you?”

The man was tall and gangly, a kind of seedy academic with a matting of thick blondish hair and glasses held to his head by an elastic strap, now pushed back into his hair. He wore a tatty green crewneck sweater under a tweed jacket that had some mothholes flagrantly displayed on the lapel. Mid-forties, no commando type, his hollow, pale cheeks bristly with day-old beard. He smiled, introducing the fact that he hadn’t discovered tooth-whitening strips, and extended a long-fingered hand. Bob shook it, discovering as he’d anticipated that it was slightly squishy and moist, and smiled back.

“Well,” Bob said, “I seem to have a bug in my head that’s saying ‘Dal-Tex’ over and over again. If there was a second rifle, it had to be there, given a bunch of other factors. I thought you might have books on it. I thought you might have a file.”

“Ah,” said the proprietor of NIAR, “very interesting.”

“I stood at the Elm Street X, and I couldn’t help but notice how close its trajectory is to the Sniper’s Nest.”

“Agreed. Many, many folks have found that fascinating.”

“I’m sort of late to this game, so forgive me for my ignorance. I’m guessing that a lot has been thrashed over, gone through, shaken out, and I don’t want to waste my time doing what someone already did in 1979.”

“I don’t blame you, friend,” said the man, settling easily into a conversational posture by resting his rear on the counter and crossing his arms. “Especially now. You know, with the fiftieth coming up, we’re anticipating a big surge in interest and attention. It seems like Stephen King isn’t the only guy working on an assassination book. I’m aware of a great deal of activity.”

“I’m no writer,” said Bob. “Lord knows, I couldn’t string two words together if my life depended on it. It’s the puzzle aspect of the thing, the pure solution, that is so damned fascinating.”

“I hear you,” said the man. “I’m Richard Monk, and I guess I’m CEO and janitor of NIAR. Also shipping clerk, accountant, and lightbulb replacer. It’s pretty damn glamorous.”

Bob got out his wallet and pulled a card, handing it over.

John P. Brophy (Ph.D.) (NSPE)

“Jack”

Mining Engineer (Ret.)

Boise, Idaho

“Spent my life digging holes all over the globe,” he said. “It’s pretty boring in a tent in Ecuador, so I started reading when I wasn’t digging or sleeping or drinking or whoring. I’m still reading. About three years ago, I noticed I had five or six million bucks ticking away and declared myself retired. I got hooked on JFK and have been digging into that. It seems to have taken over my life. I read your website for news every week. Anyhow, I finally worked out some stuff of my own and thought I’d come to town to check it out, see if it stands up to reality.”

“So you’re a Dal-Tex guy. I could put you in touch with a couple of other big Dal-Texers.”

“Well. .” said Bob. “Yes, but I am cautious-”

“I get it. You’ve got a theory, it’s your intellectual property, you don’t want it getting out. All of us are like that, halfway between hungering to share and fearing being ripped off. I’ll go easy, no problem.”

“You know everybody and everything?”

“I am the Kennedy assassination,” Richard said, laughing. “I live and breathe this stuff, Jack. And I have the unfortunate problem of a photographic memory. If I read something, it’s there forever. Or at least so far. Maybe it’ll reach a point where one more fact makes my head explode.”

Swagger laughed. Richard Monk was engaging, if weird, and didn’t have that suspicious, feral quality that so many in the “assassination community” seemed to have.

“Offhand, what’s the state of the art on Dal-Tex?”

“Well, for a time the people who owned it were generous in letting researchers tour it if they made an appointment. Their policy has changed lately, I suspect because of the fiftieth, and the attention is ginning up, and they’re trying to rent out a lot of office space. I know the building manager; I might be able to get you in.”

“That would be great,” said Bob.

“To be honest, you shouldn’t expect much. The whole thing has been gutted and rehabbed twice over since ’63. Now it’s modern, you know, kind of ‘lofty,’ very chic urban Greenwich Village vibe happening. They even built an atrium into the lobby that goes up all the way through the center of the building so it looks like the Bradbury Building in L.A. Very old-movie cool, but completely disconnected from 1963.”

“The windows are still where they were?”

“Absolutely,” Richard said, “and of course you’ll confirm that certain windows line up almost perfectly with the angle and the trajectory of the head shot allegedly taken by LHO that day.”