Top Down (14 page)

After an introduction and my explanation about who sent me, he and I made some small talk about our respective records. He had been a gunnery sergeant in Korea, where he’d nearly frozen to death at the Chosin Reservoir. He went through a descriptive list of his various body parts and fluids that had been frozen. He spoke in a low, gravelly voice that, like everything else about him, was standard issue.

The chitchat finally finished, I said, “I’m looking for a rifle like the one Oswald used to shoot Kennedy.”

“The whole world knows that Oswald never fired a round at Kennedy,” Gunny Dickens said without so much as a blink. “They planted that palm print on the stock of the rifle and
then hid it behind those boxes at that Texas School Book Depository building to implicate Oswald and then set him up for Ruby to kill him.”

I remained silent as Gunny went on.

“The killers of John F. Kennedy on November twenty-second, 1963, were a squad of seven Mafia-trained CIA assassins who were paid by a rich anti-Catholic defrocked Episcopalian priest fanatic with ties to Castro, Johnson, and Steinbrenner, the leadership of South African army intelligence, Merrill Lynch, Chrysler, and the New York Yankees.”

I said only, “Mmmmmmm.”

He went on. “The Kennedy killing team fired twelve shots—four from up and behind through four different windows in two separate buildings, two below street level on Elm Street directly below from a sewer culvert, three from the grassy knoll up north and on the west side of the motorcade, two from the railroad underpass directly in front, and, of course, one from inside the presidential limousine itself by a rogue Secret Service agent.”

Though I had heard this kind of crap many times in my post-assassination reporting, I had never heard it spit out in such a one-two-three organized fashion and with so many details aggregated into one idiotic plot.

I still said nothing but I was careful to maintain eye contact—to at least fake hanging on his every stupid word.

“Why do you want such a weapon?” Gunny finally asked.

“I want to try a reenactment,” I said.

“Why? I just told you what happened. Everybody knows it.”

“I have a friend with a serious, personal reason to find out what would have happened had there been a bubble top on Kennedy’s car when the shots were fired,” I said.

Gunny nodded. That’s all he did. He just nodded. I knew from my own reporting experiences that conspiracy nuts had conversations like this as routinely as if they were about whether cheeseburgers are better with mustard or mayonnaise.

“The rifle they claim was used on Kennedy, of course, was an Italian Carcano bolt-action, single-shot 6.5-caliber piece of nineteen-ninety-five mail-order junk,” Gunny said. “There’s no way in hell it could have hit both Kennedy and Connally—” He stopped himself from going on.

“I don’t have one of those,” Gunny continued after a beat. “But I’ve got something as close as you can get. It’s a Model 39 Mosin-Nagant sport rifle made in Finland about the same time as the alleged assassination Italian piece.”

He motioned for me to follow him and, after unlocking three doors, one of them of solid steel, we went into a back room that contained enough weaponry to outfit a small army. There were dozens of pistols, automatic rifles, grenades, and rocket launchers, along with a couple of sixty-millimeter mortars and even a flamethrower.

After looking about the vault for a few minutes, Gunny handed me a bolt-action rifle with a telescopic sight that very much resembled the weapon Oswald—or whoever—used to
kill John F. Kennedy. Both the dark brown wood stock and the metal parts glistened from polish and care. Gunny told me that rifles like this were mostly used by snipers in Russia and Eastern Europe.

“Here’s a box of seven rounds,” he said. “Don’t be wasteful—there’s not much of this kind of stuff.”

I promised to use the ammo wisely.

And when I asked what it was all going to cost to rent it for a couple of days, Gunny said: “The ammo’s a dollar a round. I gave you the four extra in case you wanted to practice a bit first. The rifle’s yours to use—on the house, marine to marine. Pay for the ammo when you return the weapon. Just clean it before you bring it back, Lieutenant.”

I said I would do that. That was a rule of the shooting road. No professional ever returns a borrowed weapon uncleaned. Gunny handed me a cleaning kit, which was a fold-up rod with cloth swabs that were thrust up and down inside the barrel of the rifle after firing. I’d had plenty of experience doing that to the M1 rifle I used during my officers’ and infantry training.

“Some people think that Kennedy would have lived, no matter what, if they’d kept the bubble top on the Kennedy limo,” I said as we parted, just to give Gunny one last turn-on. “Might have deflected the shots or scared off Oswald to begin with.”

“Only some weirdo on dope would ever believe a thing like that,” Gunny said. “Oswald never knew that Carcano rifle
existed till the cops found it after the assassination behind those boxes where the CIA’s mob hit team planted it.”

Gunny, like all good marines, seldom disappointed—even when talking absolute nonsense.

A
S
I 
WALKED
out of Gunny’s carrying that rifle, I knew that for at least this exact moment in time, Marti Walters adored me. A worshipful look flashed across her face that was unlike anything I had ever seen.

She grabbed me long and hard when I finally sat down by her in the right front passenger seat of the Pontiac wagon after carefully laying the rifle on the floor of the backseat.

“You really are wonderful, Jack,” she said. “I will sing the ‘Marines’ Hymn’ in your honor for the rest of my life.”

I thought she might add a few tears of joy to her demonstration of appreciation but she held back.

We still had another important stop to make.

She drove us nearly forty-five minutes north to the Mack Truck shop. It took only a few minutes for two men in the parts department to pull out two large sheets of Plexiglas and then, per my instructions, cut them into the six pieces that we were going to need.

I stacked them carefully in the backseat as Marti handed a ten-dollar bill to the guy in charge. I didn’t know the going rate for Plexiglas but that seemed awfully cheap to me. Maybe he had been charmed by Marti. Whatever happened, we drove off from the truck place.

“So, what now?” I said.

Our planning had been undertaken with what could only be termed a one-step-at-a-time approach. I had more or less insisted on that, because I was really doubtful we would ever get our hands on a suitable rifle, among the other necessary things. Frankly, I was mostly just playing along. I never thought we would get this far in staging the reenactment Marti had in mind.

“We go back to Kinderhook—and then to Lindenwald,” Marti said, her face in a huge grin.

“Lindenwald?”

“Martin Van Buren’s old house. The tower would be perfect. I think it would have a special meaning to Dad for it to be there, too.”

“For what to be there?”

“Our reenactment—of course.”

We rode in silence for a few minutes, long enough for an obvious thought to finally find a logical place in my mind.

“You know, Marti,” I said, “we don’t have to go to all of that big reenactment trouble to find out what your dad needs to find out.”

She didn’t even turn her head in my direction. “I
know
that,” she said.

Just to make sure we were talking about the same thing, I said: “We could go into a secluded place in some woods, put up a piece of the Plexiglas somewhere, and take a shot at it from ninety feet away at the appropriate angle …”

“Don’t even suggest such a thing.”

“Why not? Then we’d know now—right now, without having to produce some crazy staged shooting from a tower. We’d know. And we could just tell him. We could save him from all this effort.”

“Tell him we already know what’s going to happen when those shots are fired?”

“No, no. Maybe we don’t tell him anything. But if it doesn’t shatter we could keep quiet and try to think of something else or turn it over to Reynolds to do his thing …”

“Don’t tell Dad if it turns out that the glass does not shatter? Tell him only if it does?”

Her question had no answer. She wasn’t really listening to me. Clearly, there
had
to be a reenactment, and that was that.

Glancing harshly at me, she said, “It has to be an honest reenactment for it to work for Dad. He would know if it were not real—not straight. He would know if we already knew what was going to happen. Dr. Reynolds wouldn’t approve of that, either. He believes in
real
reliving therapy.”

I very much doubted the veracity of either of her points but I chose not to answer, letting the silence take over the last several minutes of our drive back to Kinderhook.

I also doubted that she adored me quite as much as she had a few minutes ago.

O
VER THE NEXT
two days, I came to believe Marti Walters was the smartest, toughest twenty-year-old kid, male or female, I had ever encountered—marines included.

She brought an energetic sharpness to every aspect of the
planning and preparation of our Lindenwald adventure. She also had an abundance of shout, guile, and charm, with the sense to know when and in what proportions to employ each.

“Dad, always remember that this is about you and for you,” she said to Van Walters when we first told him what her “team”—she and I plus maybe her mother—were planning.

He kept his eyes open and his head up as we began going through the details. But he started shaking his head maybe fifteen minutes in, as I was explaining how I was going to arrange the six pieces of Plexiglas into a makeshift version of the bubble top.

“What is it?” Marti asked her father.

“Never going to work, never going to work, never going to work.”

“I’ve got some strong masking tape to keep the pieces together,” I said quickly in response.

“Never going to work, never going to work, never going to work.”

Van Walters closed his eyes and leaned his head back against the pillow on the chaise lounge where he still spent most of his days and nights.

Marti stuck her face right down in his and shouted: “You listen to me, Special Agent Walters! You listen to me with every ounce of whatever you have left in your mind and soul!”

His eyes popped open.

“You are dying! D-y-i-n-g—dying! The only thing that can save your life is if Jack and I can prove something to you that will convince you that you do not have to die!”

No Parris Island DI could have matched the force with which that little American literature major delivered those words.

“Kennedy would have died no matter what you did about that bubble top! No matter what! That is the fact and we are going to prove it to you! Let’s go get our work done, Jack!”

My marine instincts almost had me saluting and saying,
Aye, aye, ma’am!
despite my own very real question about what would happen once those shots were fired. I had no idea—and neither, of course, did Marti—if the glass was going to shatter or deflect, if it was going to protect or kill.

Out in the hallway with the door slammed by Marti behind us, she said in her normal voice, “I’m going to have to shake him and shake him. Keep on him and stay on him. But right now let’s go check the tower to make sure it works.”

I followed without a word.

Marti had used a Walters family connection to convince the owners of Lindenwald and the Kinderhook police that there were good reasons for allowing the live firing of three rifle shots down at some Plexiglas ninety feet on the ground below. “It’s part of a very confidential exercise—that I don’t fully understand the extent of myself—to explore several unknowns about presidential assassinations.” That was the line she used.

I was not with her for that conversation, so all I know is what she told me. “I sealed the deal when I told them that a marine sharpshooter who’d won the Medal of Honor in Korea and had investigated the Kennedy assassination for a government
commission was going to do the actual shooting.” Guile, guile—lots of guile. Lies, lies—lots of lies.

The federal government had recently begun a process for eventually taking over ownership as well as possession of Lindenwald, the eighth president’s house. The plan was eventually to restore the three-story mansion to its early splendor and to open it to the public. The critical word was
eventually
. For now it remained vacant in a well-worn, deteriorating state having been used, at various times, as a privately owned residence and a for-rent venue for parties.

We drove off Highway 9 down a short gravel road. When the house came into view, we followed a drive and stopped behind the building.

Marti had been given a key to the place by a member of the family that owned Lindenwald. We used it to enter through a back door on the first floor and took a staircase that we knew led up to the tower, which rose another floor higher above the house itself. The place was a mess of cracked plaster walls and ceilings, warped and scarred wooden doors. There were small stacks of junk around—hardened paintbrushes, dead potted plants, scraps of carpet, old newspapers and magazines. The staircase, large and square-cornered, was enclosed by plaster walls adorned by a few cheap paintings and sketches of nineteenth-century gentry and scenery. The stairs and banisters were a dark brown wood that was badly in need of refinishing and varnish. We kicked up whiffs of must and dust with each step we took.

I figured the preservation feds were going to arrive here in
barely the nick of time to save Lindenwald from its aging and neglect.

But the inside of Lindenwald was not what Marti’s and my excursion was about. What mattered was the view from the tower’s ten-foot-by-ten-foot-square portico. It was covered with an Italianate roof but open on all four sides.

Within a few seconds, I knew this was going to work for our enactment.

I had stood and knelt at the sixth-floor window of the Texas School Book Depository more than a dozen times while working on various stories for the
Tribune
. I was always struck by how close everything was. Ninety feet from the window down to where the presidential limousine was moving at barely fifteen miles an hour seemed like it was close enough to touch the Kennedys and the Connallys. Like many others who had also been to the window, I was not surprised that Oswald hit his target. It would have been an easy shot for almost anyone with any level of marksmanship training. Oswald, who was a former marine—a fact that pained me every time I had to write it in my newspaper—would have definitely had that training.