The Third Bullet (10 page)

As for Oswald, or whoever was back there in the building, whichever one it was, his situation was completely different. His shot, in wing-shooting terminology, was an outgoer. It’s pretty easy. The target presents very little angle. The limo wasn’t exactly at zero degrees angle to him, but as it moved down Elm Street and as he oriented himself in the window to track it, it was under five degrees. From his point of view, even through that poor-quality scope, it was trending right to left slowly, possibly even undetectably to him. Its main quality was that it was diminishing in size as it traveled farther in distance. Neither of these conditions required that he shoot on the deflection, demanding that skillful computation of lead. He could hold point-blank on the target, concentrate on his squeeze, and get his shot off. If the rifle was accurate and the sight aimed dead zero, then the shot was technically no harder than a benchrest shot at a rifle range. The difference in distances—75 feet versus 263 feet—was hardly meaningful. To Bob’s sniper’s brain, the shot from behind and above was far easier than a shot from 90 degrees at a vehicle accelerating at an unknown rate.

Swagger thought: Hmm, that’s kind of interesting. The shot
had
to come from behind.

S
hower, dress, coffee, paper. The same khaki suit, still baggy. The same red tie. He noticed neither tie nor suit and headed out. Dal-Tex was eight blocks or so away, the same walk as last night’s jaunt to Dealey, and he thought it would do his hip some good to walk it.

He made them easily enough. Two of them. One on foot, one trailing in a car, which looked to be an ’09 Chevy. The car hopscotched, and the man on foot would change duties with the driver. One guy was black, in a black suit with no necktie, a porkpie hat, and shades. The other was dour and plump, in plaid sport coat and slacks, no tie, no hat, no glasses, sun or otherwise. They were not amateurs.

Bob walked down Main, swallowed by the glass-and-steel canyons that had not been there fifty years ago. As last night, he followed Kennedy’s route, pungently aware that the style of modern air-conditioning climate control largely banished the open window from large building construction. No open windows in the sheets of tinted glass that rose forty stories.

It was all different for Kennedy. The buildings then were squatter, stouter things, constructed mostly in the twenties and thirties, lots of ornamentation and showy work, arches and cupolas and the other flourishes that cheap skilled labor could routinely produce in brick or stone. And windows. The close-in canyons of Main must have pushed JFK past fifty thousand open windows, and a shooter could have lurked in any of them. It was outside the limits then. Kennedy himself joked about it and drew smiles because it was such a fantastic possibility. He was just about out of windows too; beyond the
depository, it was wide-open space all the way to the Trade Mart and the speech he never gave. The fifty-thousand-and-first window had a gunman behind it. End of story.

As had Kennedy, Swagger reached Main’s jog at Dealey, and instead of turning left to follow Main, he turned right down Houston. A block brought him to the corner where he’d met Nick, where Houston crossed Elm and the two brick piles stood side by side, the Book Depository and Dal-Tex, almost twins: square girder and mortar palaces.

He looked hard at Dal-Tex. A biggish office building, seven stories tall, redbrick, flat roof, fairly elaborate with arches built into the brick, recessing the windows, thick stone slabs edging the roof, big windows that opened from the bottom up. He could see where new oranger brick had replaced a couple of chunks at the joinery of the Elm-Main corner, to sustain a new brand for the unit. That corner also sported the building’s sole retail unit, the Sixth-Floor Museum souvenir shop and coffee gallery, though it was unclear if it was officially connected with the museum in TBD across the street, or if they had claimed the name as a marketing ploy. He noted that a fire escape, which in 1963 ran the height of the building on Houston Street, was gone.

Swagger’s vision drifted leftward, across the gulf of Houston Street, and settled again on LHO’s sniper’s nest, at the sixth-floor corner window. From where Swagger stood at the corner of the two streets, the window seemed immense. It couldn’t have been seventy-five feet away, and the downward angle wouldn’t affect the trajectory because the range was so close. You point at the white shirt through that junky scope and pull the trigger and cannot miss; no bad trigger pull could jerk the gun far enough to make a difference, no wind deflection could push the bullet from its destiny, nothing could interfere with its flight into flesh.

He stood on the corner, again imagining the slow pivot of the big car as the driver wheeled it through the 120 degrees of the turn. It
would have been all but stationary except for the slow pivot. And up there, behind Window 50,001, was the gunman.

Again: why didn’t he shoot then? Wide-open target, straight angle into the high chest, Connally too far forward to interfere, Jackie to the right and out of the way, the shot
so easy.
A Boy Scout could have made it.

What was going on with LHO up there in his nest?

Another mystery, unknowable, unsolvable, that had died with Jack Ruby’s .38 Special into Lee Harvey.

Swagger waited for the light to change, crossed the street, turned right and then left up the four steps, and entered Dal-Tex.

The first thing he felt was the openness. Looking up, he saw space, as an atrium scooped from the guts of the building exposed several floors of balconies and the wood trusses of the roof. Moving ahead to the security kiosk, he was greeted by a man in his forties, well dressed and pleasant.

“Mr. Arons? My name is Jack Brophy. I think my friend Richard Monk called you on my behalf.”

They shook hands and Arons said, “Yes, he did, Dr. Brophy—”

“Jack, please.”

“Jack, then. He did, and I like Richard, so I’ll be happy to take you through and try to answer any of your questions.”

Swagger peppered the man with inquiries. The first concerned the atrium, which, no, wasn’t there in ’63. It was the creation of a nineties refurb. The whole building, Swagger saw, had the kind of urban-hip tone of so many gentrified older units, and the new designer had stressed raw brick where possible, lots of plain white structural wood, simplicity and unforced elegance everywhere. The ceilings had been cleverly peeled of stucco, exposing the stout girders that were the frame of the building nested in the still-sound wood beams that also sustained the building’s pressures.

“I’m guessing these three elevators were here before?” he asked as they rode up.

“Since the beginning,” said Arons. “They’ve been rehabbed, of course”—the elevator was sleek stainless and teak, with mirrors for the vain—“but the shaft was always here, central rear.”

“Got it. Were there ever any elevator operators? Particularly in 1963?”

“Not then, not ever.”

“What about security?”

“Never. Not until recently, that is.”

Swagger felt that the building was smaller on the inside than on the outside, even with the opened atriums and ceilings. Also, it was squarer; somehow you sensed the perfection of its symmetries inside, whereas from outside, it seemed longer one way, more rectangular.

They started on the seventh floor, and Arons took him to an unrented office suite that fronted on Houston Street, looking south to the Book Depository. Its roof could be seen twenty-five feet away, but more evident was the angle down Elm, exposing totally the street up to and beyond the X that marked the brain shot.

It didn’t take a genius to see how easy that shot, or the back shot that preceded it, would have been from here. Moreover, the wide sill made for superb, almost bench-quality stability, and since the window was recessed in an encompassing arch, the muzzle wouldn’t have been visible from the street nor, given the height, from the TBD across Houston, the only building on the horizon. The angle into the car and bodies would have been almost identical to Oswald’s, depending on the subtleties of twist and turn of the president and the governor.

“And the windows? They’ve always been the kind that slid up and down, like these, not the kind that hinged outward?”

“Always up and down.”

“And the floors? All wood, like now? Ever covered with carpet?”

“Just as you see it, except in those days, plasterboard covered the brick. Then as now, it was used for office space and storage. It was a much busier building, with a lot of garment wholesalers. They used
it as a distribution center, so it was in one sense more a warehouse, particularly on the lower floors. The office suites were on the upper four floors.”

Swagger wanted to see the angle from the front, that is, from the Elm Street windows. That was easily arranged, and he soon found himself facing down Elm from a more severe angle, yet if he stood to the left of the window and oriented himself to the street, he had an equally easy shot. Moreover, the shooter would have to be, by the mandate of the angles, concealed, as he’d be standing or sitting to the left and shooting out the window at roughly a forty-five-degree angle.

He also noted one of his watchers sitting on the park bench at Elm and Houston, right at the top of Dealey, where Bob had sat with Nick earlier. It was the black one, and he sat pretending to read a paper but in reality keeping his eyes nailed on the Dal-Tex entrance between the lid of his hat and the top of the newspaper. Bad craft. A smarter move would have been to amble down the street and set up against the Dallas Records Building across Elm, where he wouldn’t have been so visible.

The roof was next. It was accessed through a narrow stairway at the top of the stairwell, then a horizontal door. Stepping onto it, you were invisible to any building extant then, for none had been higher than it in the vicinity. The roof supported but one structure, the elevator room, which was a freestanding brick pillbox centered in the rear of the building. It had clearly been rebuilt in one of the refurbs, and unlocked, it yielded a surprisingly minimalist interior, with three big units for hoisting, each attached to an electronic board, all of it evidently computer-controlled and run by robot program.

It would have been much smaller in ’63, and Jean Marquez’s evocation of a room jammed with gears and pulleys, with the naked winding and unwinding of the cables and the stench of lubrication, all of it dark and dangerous and crowded, rang true, even if the twenty-first-century iteration had become something a lot more high-tech.

And that really was that. No puzzles solved, but no possibilities rendered inoperative by reality. He thanked Dave Arons, shook hands in the lobby, and went on his way, awaiting the phone call on Nick’s cell. It came when he was halfway back to the hotel.

“Have you picked them up?”

“Yeah. Black guy, porkpie, suit, no tie. White guy, chubby, no hat, plaid coat. Working out of a ’09 red Chevy. Should I be worried?”

“No. They’re local bozos. Ex–Dallas dicks. They work for Jackson-Barnes, the big detective agency. Their usual deal is following husbands to the love nest and getting some nice dirty ones. The dirtier the shot, the bigger the settlement. A blow job can cost Mr. Big a cool two million. Unbelievable. These guys are pretty good at following software millionaires and new-oil people around. They’re overmatched by you.”

“Who hired ’em? Richard?”

“Yeah. One of our agents has a source in their office.”

“I wouldn’t have thought Richard had the dough.”

“See, that’s interesting. He lives poor, he dresses poor, he’s the complete assassination monomaniac, but he’s worth over five mil and takes two vacations a year to, wouldn’t you know it, Bangkok.”

“Is he legit otherwise?”

“Everything checks out. Fifty-two years old. Brown University grad, went army intel for twenty, very good rep, some good undercover ops, mostly in Germany. The photographic-memory deal is apparently real, and he was valued for that. Faster than a computer. Married to a German gal, divorced. Retired a major in ’04, showed up here in ’05, set up the institute, got to know all the players, got them to trust and like him and view him as a harmless fuzzy-wuzzy nutcase but adorable. His vice appears to be porn. Not kiddie stuff, he’s too tame for that. He buys a lot of DVDs from Japan and is a member of several ‘Japorn’ chat rooms, where he holds forth with great authority.”

“Everybody has his little kink. Who pays for the ‘institute’?”

“It’s run on a yearly grant from the Thompson Foundation, a lefty
outfit out of D.C. that also gives to big gun control, big green, big lib, and other similar entities. We can’t trace it beyond that, so I don’t know if the dough originates with them or not.”

“Should I start packing?”

“No. These two Dallas flatfeet, as I say, are non-vi types. Both were in Vice, never did SWAT action. They wouldn’t be involved in a hit. Too scary for them. They’re strictly nine-to-fivers and want to go home at the end of the day and play with their kids.”

“Okay, I won’t even ditch ’em yet.”

“Jackson-Barnes is almost certainly doing some deep data mining on ‘Jack Brophy,’ but the Justice Department work should withstand that easily. You’ll check out. Richard will believe you’re who you are. Then what?”

“Tonight, when Dumb and Dumber are home, I’ll check out and disappear. I’ll let Richard wonder if I’ve left or what. In a couple of days I’ll catch him off-balance and start throwing some hardball at him. His next job, if he’s something other than a paranoid, will be to get a pic or a print on me. I’ll make sure he doesn’t. Then we’ll see what happens.”

“I don’t like that, Swagger. You’re trying to goad the violence, and we may not be able to stop them in time.”

“No, I’ll stay in touch, and we’ll set up a nice sting op when the time is right and see what we net.”

“No guns.”

“Not unless I know I’m being hunted. Then I’ll hunt back.”