11/22/63: A Novel (75 page)

“—for the baby,” Jeanne was saying.

“Oh, thank!” Marina said. “Thank very much, Jeanne, so kind!”

“Don’t just stand there, Comrade, get us something to drink!” de Mohrenschildt said. He sounded like he’d had a few belts already.

“I only have tea,” Lee said. He sounded petulant and half-awake.

“Tea’s fine. I’ve got something here in my pocket that’ll get it up on its feet.” I could almost see him wink.

Marina and Jeanne lapsed into Russian. Lee and de Mohrenschildt—their heavier footfalls unmistakable—started toward the kitchen area, where I knew I’d lose them. The women were standing close to the lamp, and their voices would cover the conversation of the men.

Then Jeanne, in English: “Oh my goodness, is that a
gun
?”

Everything stopped, including—so it felt—my heart.

Marina laughed. It was a tinkling little cocktail-party laugh,
hahaha,
artificial as hell. “He lose job, we have no money, and this crazy person buy rifle. I say, ‘Put in closet, you crazy eediot, so it don’t upset my pregnance.’”

“I wanted to do some target-shooting, that’s all,” Lee said. “I was pretty good in the Marines. Never shot Maggie’s Drawers a single time.”

Another silence. It seemed to go on forever. Then de Mohrenschildt’s big hail-fellow laugh boomed out. “Come on, don’t bullshit a bullshitter! How’d you miss him, Lee?”

“I don’t know what the hell you’re talking about.”

“General Walker, boy! Someone almost splattered his Negro-hating brains all over his office wall at that house of his on Turtle Creek. You mean you didn’t know?”

“I haven’t been reading the papers just lately.”

“Oh?” Jeanne said. “Don’t I see the
Times Herald
over there on that stool?”

“I mean I don’t read the news. Too depressing. Just the funnypages
and the want-ads. Big Brother says get a job or the baby starves.”

“So you weren’t the one who took that potshot, huh?” de Mohrenschildt asked.

Teasing him.
Baiting
him.

The question was why. Because de Mohrenschildt would never in his wildest dreams have believed a pipsqueak like Ozzie Rabbit was the shooter last Wednesday night . . . or because he knew that Lee was? Maybe because Jeanne had noticed the rifle? I wished with all my heart that the women weren’t there. Given a chance to listen to Lee and his peculiar amigo talk man-to-man, my questions might have been answered. As it was, I still could not be sure.

“You think I’d be crazy enough to shoot at someone with J. Edgar Hoover looking over my shoulder?” Lee sounded like he was trying to get into the spirit of the thing, Josh Along with George instead of Sing Along with Mitch, but he wasn’t doing a very good job.

“Nobody thinks you shot at anybody, Lee,” Jeanne said in a placating voice. “Just promise that when your baby starts to walk, you find a safer place than the closet for that rifle of yours.”

Marina replied to this in Russian, but I’d glimpsed the baby in the side yard from time to time and knew what she was saying—that June was walking already.

“Junie will enjoy the nice present,” Lee said, “but we don’t celebrate Easter. We’re atheists.”

Maybe
he
was, but according to Al’s notes, Marina—with the help of her admirer, George Bouhe—had had June secretly baptized right around the time of the Missile Crisis.

“So are we,” de Mohrenschildt said. “That’s why we celebrate the Easter Bunny!” He had moved closer to the lamp, and his roar of laughter half-deafened me.

They talked for another ten minutes, mixing English and Russian. Then Jeanne said, “We’ll leave you in peace now. I think we turned you out of bed.”

“No, no, we were up,” Lee said. “Thanks for dropping by.”

George said, “We’ll talk soon, Lee, eh? You can come to the country club. We’ll organize the waiters into a collective!”

“Sure, sure.” They were moving toward the door now.

De Mohrenschildt said something else, but it was too low for me to catch more than a few words. They might have been
get it back.
Or
got your back,
although I didn’t think that was common slang in the sixties.

When did you get it back? Was that what he said? As in
when did you get the rifle back
?

I replayed the tape half a dozen times, but at super-slow speed, there was just no way to tell. I lay awake long after the Oswalds had gone to sleep; I was still awake at two in the morning, when June cried briefly and was soothed back to dreamland by her mother. I thought of Sadie, sleeping the unrestful sleep of morphine at Parkland Hospital. The room was ugly and the bed was narrow, but I would have been able to sleep there, I was sure of it.

I thought about de Mohrenschildt, that manic shirt-ripping stage actor.
What did you say, George? What did you say there at the end? Was it
when did you get it back
? Was it
cheer up, things aren’t so black
? Was it
don’t let this set you back
? Or something else entirely?

At last I slept. And dreamed I was at a carnival with Sadie. We came to a shooting gallery where Lee stood with his rifle socked into the hollow of his shoulder. The guy behind the counter was George de Mohrenschildt. Lee fired three times and didn’t hit a single target.

“Sorry, son,” de Mohrenschildt said, “no prizes for guys who shoot Maggie’s Drawers.”

Then he turned to me and grinned.

“Step right up, son, you may have better luck.
Somebody’s
going to kill the president, why not you?”

I woke with a start in the first weak light of day. Above me, the Oswalds slept on.

Easter Sunday afternoon found me back in Dealey Plaza, sitting on a park bench, looking at the forbidding brick cube of the School Book Depository, and wondering what to do next.

In ten days, Lee was going to leave Dallas for New Orleans, the city of his birth. He would get a job greasing machinery at a coffee company and rent the apartment on Magazine Street. After spending two weeks or so with Ruth Paine and her children in Irving, Marina and June would join him. I wouldn’t follow. Not with Sadie facing a long period of recovery and an uncertain future.

Was I going to kill Lee between this Easter Sunday and the twenty-fourth? I probably could. Since losing his job at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, he spent most of his time either in the apartment or handing out Fair Play for Cuba leaflets in downtown Dallas. Once in awhile he went to the public library, where he seemed to have given up Ayn Rand and Karl Marx in favor of Zane Grey westerns.

Shooting him on the street or at the library on Young Street would be a recipe for instant incarceration, but if I did it in the upstairs apartment, while Marina was in Irving, helping Ruth Paine improve her Russian? I could knock on the door and put a bullet in his head when he opened it. Done deal. No risk of shooting Maggie’s Drawers at point-blank range. The problem was the aftermath. I’d have to run. If I didn’t, I’d be the first person the police would question. I was the downstairs neighbor, after all.

I could claim I wasn’t there when it happened, and they might buy that for awhile, but how long would it be before they discovered that the George Amberson of West Neely Street was the same George Amberson who just happened to be at a scene of violence on Bee Tree Lane in Jodie not long before? That would merit checking, and checking would soon reveal that George Amberson’s
teaching certificate came from a degree-mill in Oklahoma and George Amberson’s references were phony. At that point I’d very likely be arrested. The police would obtain a court order to open my safe deposit box if they found out I had one, and they probably would. Mr. Richard Link, my banker, would see my name and/or picture in the paper and come forward. What would the police make of my memoir? That I had a motive for shooting Oswald, no matter how crazy.

No, I’d have to run for the rabbit-hole, ditching the Chevy somewhere in Oklahoma or Arkansas, then taking a bus or train. And if I made it back to 2011, I could never use the rabbit-hole again without causing a reset. That would mean leaving Sadie behind forever, disfigured and alone.
Of course he ran out on me,
she would think.
He talked a good game about smallpox scars being as pretty as dimples, but once he heard Ellerton’s prognosis—ugly now, ugly forever—he headed for the hills.

She might not even blame me. That was the most rotten possibility of all.

But no. No. I could think of a worse one. Suppose I got back to 2011 and discovered that Kennedy had been assassinated on November 22 after all? I still wasn’t positive Oswald was on his own. Who was I to say that ten thousand conspiracy theorists were wrong, especially based on the few scraps of information all my haunting and stalking had gleaned?

Maybe I’d check Wikipedia and discover the shooter had been on the grassy knoll, after all. Or on the roof of the combined jail and county courthouse on Houston Street, armed with a sharpshooter’s rifle instead of a mail-order Mannlicher-Carcano. Or hiding in a sewer on Elm Street and watching for Kennedy’s approach with a periscope, as some of the wilder conspiracy buffs claimed.

De Mohrenschildt was a CIA asset of some kind. Even Al Templeton, who was almost positive that Oswald had acted alone, acknowledged that much. Al was convinced he was just a
little
asset, passing on bits of South and Central American tittle-tattle to keep his various oil speculations afloat. But what if he was more?
The CIA had loathed Kennedy ever since he refused to send in American troops to back the beleagured partisans at the Bay of Pigs. His graceful handling of the Missile Crisis had deepened that loathing; the spooks had wanted to use it as a pretext to end the cold war once and for all, because they were positive the ballyhooed “missile gap” was a fiction. You could read much of this in the daily papers, sometimes between the lines of the news stories, sometimes stated baldly in the op-ed essays.

Suppose certain rogue elements in the CIA had talked George de Mohrenschildt into a much more dangerous mission? Not killing the president himself, but recruiting several less-than-balanced individuals who would be willing to do the job? Would de Mohrenschildt say yes to such an offer? I thought he might. He and Jeanne lived big, but I had no real idea how they supported the Cadillac, the country club, and their sprawl of a house on Simpson Stuart Road. Serving as the cutout, a dead-short between a targeted U.S. president and an agency that theoretically existed to do his bidding . . . that would be dangerous work, but if the potential gain were big enough, a man living above his means might be tempted. And it wouldn’t even have to be a cash payoff, that was the beauty of it. Just those wonderful oil leases in Venezuela, Haiti, and the DR. Also, such work might appeal to a grandiose strutter like de Mohrenschildt. He liked action, and he didn’t care for Kennedy.

Thanks to John Clayton, I couldn’t even eliminate de Mohrenschildt from the Walker attempt. It was Oswald’s rifle, yes, but suppose Lee had found himself unable to fire it when the time came? I thought it would be just like the little weasel to choke at the critical moment. I could see de Mohrenschildt snatching the Carcano out of Lee’s trembling hands and snarling,
Give it to me, I’ll do it myself.

Would de Mohrenschildt have felt capable of making the shot from behind the garbage can Lee meant to use as a sniper’s bench? One line in Al’s notes made me think the answer was yes:
Won skeet-shooting championship at country club in 1961.

If I killed Oswald and Kennedy died anyway, it would all be for nothing. And then what? Rinse and repeat? Kill Frank Dunning again? Save Carolyn Poulin again? Drive to Dallas again?

Meet Sadie again?

She would be unmarked, and that was good. I would know what her crazy ex-husband looked like, dye-job and all, and this time I could stop him before he got close. Also good. But just thinking about going through all of it again exhausted me. Nor did I think I could kill Lee in cold blood, at least not based on the circumstantial evidence I had. With Frank Dunning, I’d known for sure. I had
seen.

So—what was my next move?

It was quarter past four, and I decided my next move was visiting Sadie. I started for my car, which was parked on Main Street. On the corner of Main and Houston, just past the old courthouse, I had a sensation of being watched and turned around. No one was on the sidewalk behind me. It was the Depository that was watching, all those blank windows overlooking Elm Street, where the presidential motorcade would arrive some two hundred days from that Easter Sunday.

They were serving dinner on Sadie’s floor when I arrived: chop suey. The smell brought back a vivid image of the way the blood had gushed over John Clayton’s hand and forearm before he fell to the carpet, mercifully facedown.

“Hey there, Mr. Amberson,” the head nurse said as I signed in. She was a graying woman in a starched white cap and uniform. A pocket watch was pinned to her formidable bosom. She was looking at me from behind a barricade of bouquets. “There was a fair amount of shouting in there last night. I’m only telling you because you’re her fiancé, right?”

“Right,” I said. Certainly it was what I wanted to be, slashed face or no slashed face.

The nurse leaned toward me between two overloaded vases. A few daisies brushed through her hair. “Look, I don’t ordinarily gossip about my patients, and I ream out the younger nurses who do. But the way her parents treated her wasn’t right. I guess I don’t
entirely
blame them for riding down from Georgia with that lunatic’s folks, but—”

“Wait. Are you telling me the Dunhills and the Claytons
carpooled
?”

“I guess they were all palsy-walsy back in happier days, so all right, fine, but to tell her that while they were visiting their daughter, their good friends the Claytons were downstairs signing their son’s body out of the morgue . . .” She shook her head. “Daddy never said boo, but that
woman
. . .”

She looked around to make sure we were still alone, saw we were, and turned back to me. Her plain country face was grim with outrage.