Top Down (17 page)

“Daddy, you said it right the first time. The bubble top might have saved his life. An inanimate object. Not a person—not you or anyone else. Lee Harvey Oswald, or whoever fired the shots, killed Kennedy. He took life and death upon himself. You didn’t …”

“Let me see that rifle,” Van Walters said to me. It was an order.

So here we were, having arrived at that awful moment I had felt coming.

“I can’t do that, sir,” I said.

“Give me the rifle, young man!”

I looked over at Marti.
Help!

Marti, to my horror and surprise, nodded to me. The nod said,
It’s okay. Give him the rifle. Give my crazy daddy the rifle
.

I glanced over at Rosemary. She just closed her eyes.

I felt the presence of Reynolds behind me. But he didn’t touch me or say anything to me.

“It’s not loaded, sir, if you’re thinking about doing anything … you know, rash,” I mumbled to Walters.

“Give me some rounds with the weapon.” Van Walters had risen to an occasion—an occasion that, I believed without a doubt, was going to lead to somebody getting seriously hurt. If not Van Walters himself, somebody he loved. The only other possible targets were Reynolds and me. He’d have no reason to take either of us out. But … this was a mentally disturbed man demanding that I give him ammo to put in a high-powered rifle and his family seemed to think it was just fine.

I looked back at Reynolds. “Do it,” the doctor whispered to me. “Give him the rifle—and the bullets.”

That left me as the only sane person present. The only person who knew that tragedy could be just seconds away.

But I did it. I took the rifle out of the blanket and gave it to Walters along with the four shiny bullets—the spares Gunny had given me.

I felt like a fool. An idiot.

“Relax … what is your name again?” Van Walters said to me.

“Jack!” Marti said sternly—almost angrily—to her father. “Jack Gilmore. He’s a wonderful man who has gone way, way beyond all limits to help me help you, Daddy. He deserves your respect—as well as your gratitude. We all do.”

Marti moved over to me and took my hand.

“Sorry,” Van Walters said to me. “I have been in another world.”

Then, without a word, Van Walters methodically loaded a round in the Finnish sniper rifle, sighted it at the bubble top, now only six feet away, and fired. The bullet hit the side panel broadside and crashed a large hole in it. He repeated it a second time, making a hole roughly the same size a foot to the right. Then a third another foot off and, finally, the fourth.

There were now four big holes in the Plexiglas evenly arranged, with cracks in the glass coming out of each, but the structure—our simple homemade bubble top that Marti and I put together with tape—was still standing.

“Thank you, Jack,” Van Walters said, handing the rifle back to me. “Need any help cleaning it?”

I had been pretty much holding my breath since I’d handed the weapon to Van Walters. It took a few seconds for me to let it go. “No thank you, sir. I’ll get it.”

By then all of the Walterses were crying and holding on to one another.

I
KNEW
M
ARTI
would come to my room that night. At the end of our monumental day and evening, she had said softly out of everyone else’s hearing, “How about I see you later?”

My smile was the answer. It was automatic. And in the hour or so since her invitation, I had been in a state of panic. What would I say and do? What would she say and do?

How in the world was this all going to end?

Van Walters had not suddenly gone back to being a fully functioning human being. He did not immediately chow down a cheeseburger with french fries, a double-layer chocolate cake, and a Bud, run ten laps around the town of Kinderhook, or have a meaningful discussion about the new anti-Johnson opinion piece (by a former Kennedy administration official) in
Harper’s
on how differently Kennedy would have handled Vietnam. (Kennedy would have either not escalated or pulled out altogether.)

“But he’s just at the beginning, don’t you think?” Marti had said. And even Van himself had said, “I think I can pull out of this. I really do think so now.” Those were his exact words.

More important, Dr. Reynolds had said the same thing to Marti. I had always assumed that psychiatrists were more hands-on—couches-on, at least—than Reynolds seemed to be throughout our reenactment adventure. It was something I might try to talk to him about—particularly if and when I wrote my
Tribune
story. Or maybe not.

“But Reynolds also said it was going to take many months to bring Dad back to health physically as well as psychologically,” Marti added. “He emphasized that relapses should be anticipated, if not counted on.”

I asked her how Reynolds explained what had happened—
why did the result of our reenactment—the opposite of what we wanted—have such a positive effect?

“It is impossible to explain in exact terms,” she said Reynolds told her. “He said his best theory is simply that when the glass didn’t splinter, it snapped Daddy back into a sense of reality. Firing those four shots on his own was what finally did it. Why, exactly, Reynolds couldn’t say. It just happened.”

Marti shrugged and smiled. So did I.

We had cleaned up the Plexiglas and other residue from our event and returned the card tables to neighbors and the key to the Lindenwald owners. I found only one of the expended slugs from the rifle. It was embedded in a tree more than a hundred feet away. I figured there was nothing more to be gained or known from locating the others, including those fired by Van Walters. Where they went was so much less important than that they went somewhere out there. I would use the kit Gunny gave me to clean the Finnish sniper rifle and return it to him in the morning on the way to the Albany airport.

I would leave in the morning. Back to Washington. To the Washington bureau of
The Dallas Tribune
. To work. To where Marti was not.

Those thoughts were at the heart of my heart. They were also foremost in my mind, maybe even obscuring my entire future at the moment. Okay, that sounds overly dramatic, but that was how I was feeling as I lay in bed listening to her footsteps approach the door to my little icebox room.

She came in, as before, with a heavy robe over her pajamas.
But this time, in addition to her furry slippers, she also had a big wool shawl around her shoulders and large mittens on her hands.

“I don’t have to crawl in bed with you, Jack, to stay warm,” she said, sitting down on the large overstuffed pillow that was the closest thing to a chair there was in the room.

She went on, “Thank you so much, Jack. You are my hero for life. Somebody should give you the Medal of Honor. I really mean that.”

I could feel my face warming, though I hoped that it didn’t show. “I’m just glad I could be of help.”

“Mom is going to benefit from all this, too, I think,” Marti said. “Reynolds told us he would find her an alcoholism treatment regimen of some kind.” She really looked relieved. “I finally asked her that big November twenty-second question of mine, by the way.”

I couldn’t remember what question she was talking about.

Marti reminded me. “Remember, I wanted to know who she was with when she went to have a drink that first time. She said she sat in the corner of a bar by herself—nobody was with her. I believe her.”

That all made me happy. I had grown most sorry for Marti’s mother. And most sympathetic.

“But that, too, will take some time,” Marti added.

I had lifted myself onto one elbow to talk with her. But small-talk time had ended. The next move was mine. I knew it and I knew Marti knew it.

So. “Let’s talk about there being a story about your dad,” I
said, trying to keep my voice steady, easy. I kept eye contact. “As you know, what has happened makes for a terrific story …”

“Not as terrific as if he had died, though. Right?” Her voice had gone as cold as the room.

I had to look away. I could not help myself. She was right about that but I wasn’t about to confirm it, of course. “He didn’t die,” I said. “And because of what you did, he won’t die. What you and I did is part of the story I want to tell. It’s what we call a good-news story.”

“We had a deal, Jack. Everything was off the record.”

“I know, I know. But the deal included our willingness to talk about it once the story was over.”

“It’s
not
over.”

“I agree it could be a while before your dad is in full recovery. But meanwhile, there’s a case to be made that doing a story about his healing process—the beginning of his healing—might be of help to others.”

“I’m sorry, Jack. I was not aware that there are other former agents of the United States Secret Service who were driven psychologically and physically near death because they ordered the bubble top taken off the Kennedy limousine.”

I took a couple of deep breaths. “I’ll bet there are other agents who were involved in the Dallas visit who are suffering under a tremendous amount of guilt,” I said, and, as I did so, I remembered something. “How about Clint Hill? You know … the agent who leaped from the backup car to the limo?”

“Yes, of course, I remember Clint Hill. Dad knew him. They worked together in Washington on the presidential protection detail. He pushed Mrs. Kennedy back down in the seat with President Kennedy. But what about him?”

“Nothing. Except I wouldn’t be surprised if he had nightmares about what happened and what else he might have done that could have saved Kennedy’s life.”

Marti stood up and glared at me. “I thought you were an honorable man, Jack Gilmore. A marine and all that.”

“I am—at least part of all that. But you also know—knew when we went into this—that I’m a reporter. I am in the story business. This is a terrific story. I very much want to write it for my paper.”

I thought she was on the verge of running out the door and slamming it angrily behind her. But she did not move.

“Martin Van Walters is not a story, Jack. He is my father. Even what you call a good-news story—publicity of any kind—about him right now would cause huge humiliation, if not serious harm. It could throw him into a relapse.”

“I’m just trying to see … well, if you and I could agree to mutually set aside our off-the-record agreement.”

“No,” she said as if pronouncing the words for a bronzing. “There is no way.”

She turned toward the door. Then back to me.

“But I do owe you, Jack.”

I froze stock-still.

“Do you want me to get in bed with you?” she asked, as if asking how I wanted my steak cooked.

I defrosted enough to raise a hand from the covers—and shake it in the negative.

“Well, then, the least I can do is drive you to the bus to Albany in the morning,” said Marti. “I assume you are still planning to leave tomorrow?”

I nodded.

After she was gone, I went through what I had just missed. The crawl into the bed under the covers next to me, the slow removal of her shawl, then the loosening of her robe …

And all the rest.

I
MADE AN
early-morning call from the Walters family phone for a reservation on an Allegheny Airlines flight to Washington National Airport. Bernie Shapiro and the
Tribune
had provided me an open return ticket when I left six days ago. Six days ago?

I couldn’t believe it had been such a short time—for me, at least. Apparently it had not been for Bernie, a fact that I would soon have to deal with—with or without the need of a passport.

Marti and I were coolly civil during the several minutes we spent together—first over coffee and a toasted English muffin in the kitchen and then in the Pontiac station wagon.

“Definitely going to graduate school, right?” I said as we drove the seven blocks to Kinderhook Market, which served as a stop for the Adirondack Trailways bus to Albany.

“Already accepted—even have a graduate assistant’s job lined up,” she said.

“Congratulations,” I said.

“Thank you,” she said.

Neither of us said a word about off-the-record or any possible newspaper story. That conversation had started and ended last night.

Marti didn’t even get out of the car at the market. We said good-bye and shook hands in the front seat while sitting next to each other. I waved to her after removing my small suitcase and the Finnish sniper rifle, which I had covered up and wrapped tightly with brown paper and tape.

The bus, which came a few minutes later, was only half full, and I took a seat by myself near the front.

I spent the entire hour-long bus ride deep in thought—and deep in unsplendid misery. I knew how to circumvent an off-the-record deal, of course. All of us in the newspaper business did. Get the story from other sources and then double back on the first source. “Might as well release the off-the-record agreement because I have the story anyhow …” In this case, I would return immediately to Kinderhook, interview the woman who owned Lindenwald and other people around town who knew about what had been happening to former Secret Service agent Martin Van Walters. I was sure I could locate the cops who would talk about the bubble top incident and our reenactment. I would be a major source myself, of course. I participated in the original event at Love Field and the one at Lindenwald. All that was unreportable would be what Marti had told me. I couldn’t be silenced under any umbrella for what
I
saw and said and did. Back in Washington, I would go
full dig into the Clint Hill story. What had happened to him and the other agents at Dallas? Any of them transferred the way Van Walters had been? Any of them treated by any doctors for mental problems? Any firings or resignations? Oh, and what about that agent who kept insisting—disturbingly so—that he personally kept the bubble top from ever being put on the Kennedy limo in the first place? Maybe I could find him or a relative who had spoken to him. Once all that was assembled and ready to go to press, I would go to Philadelphia, or wherever she was, show it to Marti, and ask for her comment, if not her cooperation …

Jack Gilmore, honorable newspaperman and Semper Fi honest former marine officer, went directly from the bus to a pay phone at the Albany Trailways station and called Bernie—collect.