11/22/63: A Novel (95 page)

A bullet spanged one of the overhead lights, shattered the bulb, and set it to swaying. Then a bullet tore off the top of the would-be assassin’s head, just as one of Lee’s had torn off the top of Kennedy’s in the world I’d come from. He collapsed onto his barricade of boxes, sending them tumbling to the floor.

Shouts from below. Someone yelling “Man down, I saw him go down!”

Running, ascending footfalls. I sent the .38 spinning toward Lee’s body. I had just enough presence of mind to know that I would be badly beaten, perhaps even killed by the men coming up the stairs if they found me with a gun in my hand. I started to get up, but my knee would no longer hold me. That was probably just as well. I might not have been visible from Elm Street, but if I was, they’d open fire on
me.
So I crawled to where Sadie lay, supporting my weight on my hands and dragging my left leg behind me like an anchor.

The front of her blouse was soaked with blood, but I could see the hole. It was dead-center in her chest, just above the slope of her breasts. More blood poured from her mouth. She was choking on it. I got my arms under her and lifted her. Her eyes never left mine. They were brilliant in the hazy gloom.

“Jake,” she rasped.

“No, honey, don’t talk.”

She took no notice, though—when had she ever? “Jake, the president!”

“Safe.” I hadn’t actually seen him all in one piece as the limo tore away, but I had seen Lee jerk as he fired his only shot at the street, and that was enough for me. And I would have told Sadie he was safe no matter what.

Her eyes closed, then opened again. The footfalls were very close now, turning from the fifth-floor landing and starting up the final flight. Far below, the crowd was bellowing its excitement and confusion.

“Jake.”

“What, honey?”

She smiled. “How we danced!”

When Bonnie Ray and the others arrived, I was sitting on the floor and holding her. They stampeded past me. How many I don’t know. Four, maybe. Or eight. Or a dozen. I didn’t bother to look at them. I held her, rocking her head against my chest, letting her blood soak into my shirt. Dead. My Sadie. She had fallen into the machine, after all.

I have never been a crying man, but almost any man who’s lost the woman he loves would, don’t you think? Yes. But I didn’t.

Because I knew what had to be done.

I wasn’t exactly arrested, but I was taken into custody and driven to the Dallas police station in a squad car. On the last block of the ride, people—some of them reporters, most of them ordinary citizens—pounded on the windows and peered inside. In a clinical, distant way, I wondered if I would perhaps be dragged from the car and lynched for attempting to murder the president. I didn’t care. What concerned me most was my bloodstained shirt. I wanted it off; I also wanted to wear it forever. It was Sadie’s blood.

Neither of the cops in the front seat asked me any questions. I suppose someone had told them not to. If they
had
asked any, I wouldn’t have replied. I was thinking. I could do that because the coldness was creeping over me again. I put it on like a suit of armor. I could fix this. I
would
fix this. But first I had some talking to do.

They put me in a room that was as white as ice. There was a table and three hard chairs. I sat in one of them. Outside, telephones rang and a Teletype chattered. People went back and forth talking in loud voices, sometimes shouting, sometimes laughing. The laughter had a hysterical sound. It was how men laugh when they know they’ve
had a narrow escape. Dodged a bullet, so to speak. Perhaps Edwin Walker had laughed like that on the night of April tenth, as he talked to reporters and brushed broken glass from his hair.

The same two cops who brought me from the Book Depository searched me and took my things. I asked if I could have my last two packets of Goody’s. The two cops conferred, then tore them open and poured them out on the table, which was engraved with initials and scarred with cigarette burns. One of them wetted a finger, tasted the powder, and nodded. “Do you want water?”

“No.” I scooped up the powder and poured it into my mouth. It was bitter. That was fine with me.

One of the cops left. The other asked for my bloody shirt, which I reluctantly took off and handed over. Then I pointed at him. “I know it’s evidence, but you treat it with respect. The blood on it came from the woman I loved. That might not mean much to you, but it’s also from the woman who helped to stop the murder of President Kennedy, and that should.”

“We only want it for blood-typing.”

“Fine. But it goes on my receipt of personal belongings. I’ll want it back.”

“Sure.”

The cop who’d left came back with a plain white undershirt. It looked like the one Oswald had been wearing—or
would
have been wearing—in the mugshot taken shortly after his arrest at the Texas Theatre.

I arrived in the little white interview room at twenty past one. About an hour later (I can’t say with exactitude because there was no clock and my new Timex had been taken with the rest of my personal effects), the same two uniforms brought me some company. An old acquaintance, in fact: Dr. Malcolm Perry, toting a
large black country doctor’s medical bag. I regarded him with mild astonishment. He was here at the police station visiting me because he didn’t have to be at Parkland Hospital, picking bits of bullet and shards of bone out of John Kennedy’s brain. The river of history was already moving into its new course.

“Hello, Dr. Perry.”

He nodded. “Mr. Amberson.” The last time he’d seen me, he’d called me George. If I’d had any doubts about being under suspicion, that would have confirmed them. But I didn’t. I’d been there, and I’d known what was about to happen. Bonnie Ray Williams would already have told them as much.

“I understand you’ve reinjured that knee.”

“Unfortunately, yes.”

“Let’s have a look.”

He tried to pull up my left pants leg and couldn’t. The joint was too swollen. When he produced a pair of scissors, both cops stepped forward and drew their guns, keeping them pointed at the floor with their fingers outside the trigger guards. Dr. Perry looked at them with mild astonishment, then cut the leg of my pants up the seam. He looked, he touched, he produced a hypodermic needle and drew off fluid. I gritted my teeth and waited for it to be over. Then he rummaged in his bag, came out with an elastic bandage, and wrapped the knee tightly. That provided some relief.

“I can give you something for the pain, if these officers don’t object.”

They didn’t, but I did. The most crucial hour of my life—and Sadie’s—was dead ahead. I didn’t want dope clouding my brain when it rolled around.

“Do you have any Goody’s Headache Powder?”

Perry wrinkled his nose as if he had smelled something bad. “I have Bayer Aspirin and Emprin. The Emprin’s a bit stronger.”

“Give me that, then. And Dr. Perry?”

He looked up from his bag.

“Sadie and I didn’t do anything wrong. She gave her life for her country . . . and
I would have given mine for her. I just didn’t get the chance.”

“If so, let me be the first to thank you. On behalf of the whole country.”

“The president. Where is he now? Do you know?”

Dr. Perry looked at the cops, eyebrows raised in a question. They looked at each other, then one of them said, “He’s gone on to Austin, to give a dinner speech, just like he was scheduled to do. I don’t know if that makes him crazy-brave or just stupid.”

Maybe,
I thought, Air Force One
was going to crash, killing Kennedy and everyone else on board. Maybe he was going to have a heart attack or a fatal stroke. Maybe some other chickenshit bravo was going to blow his handsome head off.
Did the obdurate past work against the things changed as well as against the change-agent? I didn’t know. Nor much care. I had done my part. What happened to Kennedy from this point on was out of my hands.

“I heard on the radio that Jackie isn’t with him,” Perry said quietly. “He sent her on ahead to the vice president’s ranch in Johnson City. He’ll join her there for the weekend as planned. If what you say is true, George—”

“I think that’s enough, doc,” one of the cops said. It certainly was for me; to Mal Perry I was George again.

Dr. Perry—who had his share of doctor’s arrogance—ignored him. “If what you say is true, then I see a trip to Washington in your future. And very likely a medal ceremony in the Rose Garden.”

After he departed, I was left alone again. Only not really; Sadie was there, too.
How we danced,
she’d said just before she passed from this world. I could close my eyes and see her in line with the other girls, shaking her shoulders and doing the Madison. In this memory she was laughing, her hair was flying, and her face was perfect. 2011 surgical techniques could do a lot to fix what John Clayton had done to that face, but I thought I had an even better technique. If I got a chance to use it, that was.

I was allowed to baste in my own painful juices for two hours before the door of the interview room opened again. Two men came in. The one with the basset-hound face beneath a white Stetson hat introduced himself as Captain Will Fritz of the Dallas Police. He had a briefcase—but not
my
briefcase, so that was all right.

The other guy had heavy jowls, a drinker’s complexion, and short dark hair that gleamed with hair tonic. His eyes were sharp, inquisitive, and a little worried. From the inside pocket of his suit coat he produced an ID folder and flipped it open. “James Hosty, Mr. Amberson. Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

You have good reason to look worried,
I thought.
You were the man in charge of monitoring Lee, weren’t you, Agent Hosty?

Will Fritz said, “Like to ask you a few questions, Mr. Amberson.”

“Yes,” I said. “And I’d like to get out of here. People who save the President of the United States generally don’t get treated like criminals.”

“Now, now,” Agent Hosty said. “We sent you a doc, didn’t we? And not just any doc;
your
doc.”

“Ask your questions,” I said.

And got ready to dance.

Fritz opened his briefcase and brought out a plastic bag with an evidence tag taped to it. Inside it was my .38. “We found this lying against the barricade of boxes Oswald set up, Mr. Amberson. Was it his, do you think?”

“No, that’s a Police Special. It’s mine. Lee had a .38, but it was a Victory model. If it wasn’t on his body, you’ll probably find it wherever he was staying.”

Fritz and Hosty looked at each other in surprise, then back at me.

“So you admit you knew Oswald,” Fritz said.

“Yes, although not well. I didn’t know where he was living, or I would have gone there.”

“As it happens,” Hosty said, “he had a room on Beckley Street. He was registered under the name O. H. Lee. He seems to have had another alias, too. Alek Hidell. He used it to get mail.”

“Wife and kiddo not with him?” I asked.

Hosty smiled. It spread his jowls approximately half a mile in either direction. “Who’s asking the questions here, Mr. Amberson?”

“Both of us,” I said. “I risked my life to save the president, and my fiancée
gave
hers, so I think I have a right to ask questions.”

Then I waited to see how tough they’d get. If real tough, they actually believed I’d been in on it. Real easy, they didn’t but wanted to be sure. It turned out to be somewhere in the middle.

Fritz used a blunt finger to spin the bag with the gun in it. “I’ll tell you what might have happened, Mr. Amberson. I won’t say it
did,
but you’d have to convince us otherwise.”

“Uh-huh. Have you called Sadie’s folks? They live in Savannah. You should also call Deacon Simmons and Ellen Dockerty, in Jodie. They were like surrogate parents to her.” I considered this. “To both of us, really. I was going to ask Deke to be my best man at our wedding.”

Fritz took no notice of this. “What might have happened was you and your girl were in on it with Oswald. And maybe at the end you got cold feet.”

The ever-popular conspiracy theory. No home should be without one.

“Maybe you realized at the last minute that you were getting ready to shoot the most powerful man in the whole world,” Hosty said. “You had a moment of clarity. So you stopped him. If it went like that, you’d get a lot of leniency.”

Yes. Leniency to consist of forty, maybe even fifty years in Leavenworth
eating mac and cheese instead of death in the Texas electric chair.

“Then why weren’t we there with him, Agent Hosty? Instead of hammering on the door to be let in?”

Hosty shrugged.
You tell me.

“And if we were plotting an assassination, you must have seen me with him. Because I know you had him under at least partial surveillance.” I leaned forward. “Why didn’t
you
stop him, Hosty? That was
your
job.”

He drew back as if I’d raised a fist to him. His jowls reddened.

For a few moments at least, my grief hardened into a kind of malicious pleasure. “The FBI kept an eye on him because he defected to Russia, redefected to the United States, then tried to defect to Cuba. He was handing out pro-Fidel leaflets on street corners for months before this horror show today.”