The Third Bullet Read online

  “You never read the letter, however.”

  “Not even close. I’m telling you more or less what I later heard from Jim when I wasn’t listening hard.”

  Swagger nodded, seeing the old agent getting the thick packet from an unknown person in Dallas and slowly considering its contents. “What did this Secret Service guy do?”

  “For whatever reason, nothing. In fact, he probably threw it out. Crazy Kennedy bullshit, you know the drill. He was sick of it, as he’d figured in some theories too, and he didn’t like it. He was also in ill health, living in a geriatric apartment in Silver Spring, mourning the death of his wife, and knew he didn’t have much time.”

  “I see.”

  “Yet it lingered. He couldn’t put it out of his mind. A few years after that, he writes a letter—half a letter—to my husband. He never finishes it. He never sends it. Maybe he thinks better of it. Who knows? Anyway, he dies. And that would seem to be that. No more lingering. The lingering is over. But then: his daughter finds the letter a few years later. So she sends it on to Jim. So years after the coat was found, years after the identity of the smell was discovered, years after it was communicated to a retired Secret Service agent, years after he died, courtesy of his daughter, it was sent to my husband.”

  “And he sees the possibilities?”

  “More than most. He’s looking for a project. He has a contract that calls for a book a year, he’s just finished one, but there’s no rest for the wicked, and when he gets the half-written letter that Floyd almost sent him concerning the lost letter the Engineer sent to Floyd, he sees something. He spends a few days researching, looking at maps, reading books or at least examining them, and then he has some kind of eureka moment. He claims he’s solved the JFK assassination. I suspect vodka played a part. It turns out he means he has an idea no one else has had. And he has to go to Dallas. And so he goes to Dallas.”

  “Was he successful?”

  “He talked to a bunch of people, I think he got into Dal-Tex, he came back very excited. He started working like a madman. One day a week later, he goes off to a bar for a drink and ends up with a broken back and pelvis in an alley.”

  “You think he was killed because he was looking into a certain idea about JFK’s death?”

  “I haven’t said that. I’ve spoken only in facts, and the fact is that now I’m the world’s sole possessor of the story. And it lingers. I can’t get it out of my head, and the connection between it and Jim’s immediate death by possible homicide won’t let me sleep at night. I have to do every last thing to make sure that the story is properly processed. Someone has to deal with it, judge it, assess it, contextualize it, someone who knows this stuff and has worked in this world. I have nominated you for that high honor. So now I ask the question I came all this way for. Is it anything?”

  He let out a large breath.

  “What does that signify?” she asked. “You think I’m an idiot? The whole thing is nonsense? What a colossal waste of time?”

  “No. I can see how it provokes. I ain’t denying that. And I’m not saying I’m a hundred percent Warren Commission lone-gunman guy. I haven’t looked at it hard enough, but I do think, like you, that a lot of the ‘theories’ are stuff people dreamed up to make a buck. I also think that the thing has been looked at so much by so many people for so long that it’s highly unlikely there’s anything left unfound.”

  “Fair enough.”

  “Let me put it before you in a different way, all right? I think you’re missing something, and I think your husband missed it and Floyd missed it, all the way back to the Engineer. That thing you all missed is Texas. Texas is gun country. You may have to explain why you have a gun in Baltimore, but you sure don’t in Texas. Everyone has a gun in Texas. They have ’em to wear to barbecues or the opera or the swim meet. Nobody blinks an eye, and that was especially true down there then, before JFK. Nobody thought a thing about a gun. It just was, that’s all. The presence of a gun in that building isn’t remarkable. In fact, it’s nothing. I can think of a hundred reasons for a gun in that building other than killing a president. Maybe some boys were heading out for deer season straight from work. Save time, get there opening-day morning. They brought their rifles in, and one of them knew his needed cleaning, so he does the job. Nobody says a thing because it ain’t remarkable. He leans the gun in a corner and it rubs up against somebody’s coat. When that guy gets his coat, he sees it’s ruined, it goes into the wastebasket, and later that night the janitor finds it and decides to scavenge it. He hangs it up to dry out, but Hoppe’s being powerful, the stink never does go away. So he stuffs it somewhere, meaning to check it out later, and forgets about it. Years later, the elevator people discover it. That could have happened not just for deer season but in pheasant season too, as they kill a lot of them birds down there, and doves and pigeons and anything that flies. So you have found the suggestion of a gun in a building in Texas, and it surprises you only because you don’t know guns or Texas.”

  “I see,” she said.

  “Ma’am—Jean, if I may—you’ve got what the Marine Corps would call intelligence that doesn’t rise to the actionable level. It doesn’t carry enough meaning to be acted on. There are too many other possibilities here for anyone to do anything about it. My best advice is to congratulate yourself for following up on your duty to your husband and then go back to your life. I think your husband would have found that out in time too. Maybe he could do something with his discovery if it were a fiction book, but I don’t see it as having any real meaning in the world, and it sure didn’t have anything to do with his death. Sorry to be so blunt, but you didn’t come all this way and invest all this time for sugarcoating.”

  “No, I didn’t, Mr. Swagger. I believe you’ve set me straight.”

  “I hope I helped, ma’am. And I’m very sorry about your husband. Maybe by the time you get back, they will have caught the boy.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Let me walk you to your car, and we’ll get you out of this godforsaken place.”

  “Thank you.”

  They both rose as he peeled off a few bills for the waitress and headed out to her Fusion.

  “I guess we’ll never know,” she said as she got to her car, “who ran over the mystery man with a bicycle.”

  He was only half listening at this time, trying to sneak a look at his watch to see what time it was and how soon he could get back, because he’d promised to help Miko on her low-roping skills and—

  “I’m sorry,” he said. “What did you say?”

  “Oh, the back of the coat, it had a smear on it that appeared to represent a tread. The Engineer thought it could have been from an English bike, you know, thin-wheeled. It was an impression, about an inch long, where it looked like a tread mark had been printed. That’s all. A minor point, I forgot to—”

  “Do you have a list of the people your husband visited?”

  “I have his notebook. It’s hard to read, but it does have some names and addresses there. Why, what is—”

  “I have to set some things up. It’ll take me a week. I want you to go home and find that notebook and FedEx it to me. If he had computer files on the Dallas trip or notepapers, get me that stuff too. I’ll get down there as soon as I’m set up.”

  “Do you want to borrow the tommy gun?”

  “No, not yet.”

  “You’re not joking, are you?”

  “No ma’am.”

  “Do you want me to help defray the expenses? I mean, I seem to be wealthy now, and I—”

  “No ma’am,” said Swagger. “This one’s on me.”

  CHAPTER 3

  A man sat on a park bench at the corner of Houston and Elm, under a spread of aged oak trees, before some kind of odd rectangular white cement ceremonial pool that appeared to be full of Scope. Around him, la vie touristique occurred, a subspecies of human behavior mandating that small knots of oddly dressed people congregated here and there, with cameras inadequate to
the scale of the urban space, called Dealey, which they commanded. It was all very strange. Sometimes a particularly brave one would dash onto Elm Street to stand, during a brief traffic interruptus, at one of two X’s that marked the spots on which a man had been shot to death. Meanwhile, homeless men roamed, some to beg, some to sell for five bucks a rag called The Conspiracy Chronicles that promised the latest dish on 11-22-63.

  Directly across Elm from the man stood a box of bricks seven stories tall, undistinguished but famous, called the Texas Book Depository. Despite its banality, it had one of the most recognizable facades in the world, especially a corner of the sixth floor where the ambusher had lurked fifty years ago. The sky was bold Texas blue, and a slight wind blew east to west across the territory, which was surrounded by the churn of cars and trucks as they cascaded down Houston and made the tricky turn to the left down Elm for the access to the Stemmons Freeway just beyond the triple underpass. People had things to do, places to go, and for most Dallasites, the tragedy of Dealey Plaza had long since faded. Swagger sat alone, but in his mind, it was 1963, 24/7.

  He looked this way and that, up and down, around, down streets, at his shoes, at his fingertips, and he tried to remember. It had been a day like this one, cloudless after a threat of early rain, the sky as blue as a movie star’s eyes. At least that’s what the papers said. He himself had been asleep at the time, half a world away on an island called Okinawa where, as a seventeen-year-old lance corporal, he’d just made the battalion rifle team and would spend the next three weeks cradling a ton of Garand on a flat, dry firing range, trying to put holes in black circles six hundred yards or so off. He didn’t know a goddamn thing about anything and wouldn’t for years.

  But at 12:29 p.m., back in Dallas, the president’s motorcade turned right off of Main Street and proceeded one block up Houston, at the northern boundary of the triangular open park that was Dealey Plaza. Now he saw it. Lincoln limo, long black boat of a car. Two up front, driver and agent, two lower, Governor Connally and his wife, then the regal couple, the blessed, the charismatic, John F. Kennedy in his suit and his wife, Jackie, in pink, both waving at the close-by crowds.

  The car reached Elm and cranked left. It had to access the Stemmons Freeway, which could only be entered from Elm. It was a 120-degree turn, not a 90-degree turn, so the driver, a Secret Service agent named Greer, had to slow down considerably as he maneuvered the heavy vehicle around the corner. Speeding up, he passed by some trees and continued on a slight downward angle along Elm Street. Immediately to his right was the seven-story building known as the Texas Book Depository, the undistinguished pile of plain brickwork that now loomed over Swagger. He ran his eyes up its edge and halted them at the corner of the sixth floor and saw . . . only a window.

  On that day, at 12:30 p.m., as the car passed by the trees, a sound that virtually everyone agreed was a gunshot was heard. It appeared to have struck nobody directly, but at least one witness, a man named Tague, reported being stung by what can reasonably be assumed was a fragment, as the bullet broke apart when it hit the curbstone behind the car or a branch in the trees. Bullets do this; it is not strange or remarkable. Within six or so seconds, a second bullet was fired, and most people there assumed it came from the looming depository. That bullet hit the president in the back, near the neck, tumbled through his body, emerged from his throat, nicking his tie, and flew on to hit John Connally horizontally. It penetrated his body entirely too, hit and broke his wrist, and thudded into but did not penetrate his thigh. It was found later that afternoon on a gurney at the hospital. This was the “magic bullet” that many claimed could not have done what this one did.

  The third bullet was the head shot, a few seconds later (how many would be legendarily unclear) delivered at a distance of 263 feet from the sixth floor of the Texas Book Depository. It hit the president high in the back of the head on a downward angle. It appears to have disintegrated or detonated, as the few traces of its existence are controversial at best. It blew a large chunk of brain out of the skull, exiting in a burst of vaporized material that jetted or exploded from the right side of the head.

  Chaos ensued. The limousine raced off to the hospital, with its cargo of two gravely wounded men and their women. Police moved, perhaps not quickly enough, to cordon off the building from which the shots seemed to have been fired. In time, after a roll was taken, police learned that an employee named Lee Harvey Oswald was missing, though he had been seen there that day and was even confronted by a police officer in the lunchroom right after the shooting.

  A description of Oswald was broadcast, and some miles away, in Dallas’s Oak Cliff section, an officer named J. D. Tippit spotted a man who matched that description. Tippit stopped and called him over. He got out of his car and was shot four times by the suspect and died on the spot.

  The suspect walked away, but concerned citizens followed him; others noted his odd behavior and knew that suspicions were flying around Dallas about the Kennedy assassin. They noted that he sneaked into a movie theater, and the police were called. Thus was Lee Harvey Oswald arrested.

  Meanwhile, at the Book Depository, officers found a “sniper’s nest” of book cartons arranged at the site of the sixth-floor (NE) corner window, three ejected 6.5 mm Mannlicher-Carcano casings, and a hundred feet away, at the site of the sole stairway off the floor, a surplus Mannlicher-Carcano Model 38 carbine with a cheap and poorly attached Japanese-made scope. The rifle had been cocked and carried a live cartridge in its chamber.

  It soon proved that Oswald’s fingerprints were on the rifle and on the boxes in the sniper’s nest, that he had carried a suspicious bag of “curtain rods” into the depository that morning, that he had ordered, under pseudonyms, both the Carcano rifle and the .38 Special S & W revolver used in the Tippit slaying. Moreover, he was a notorious malcontent with “revolutionary tendencies,” a self-proclaimed Communist, a former defector, a mediocre marine (accounting for his shooting skill), a wife beater, and an all-around creep.

  He never stood trial because he was murdered by Jack Ruby on the morning of November 24, 1963, as he was being led to an armored car for transfer to a more secure holding area.

  Those seemed to be the facts which, after much haggling, all had come to believe and accept. Swagger believed them and accepted them—that is, until his chat with Jean Marquez.

  Her words touched one of his own memories, not a public memory at all but a private, long-buried one. He had been stalked once by a certain team of men in his long and turbulent past, and the smudge she had reported on the back of a coat had a meaning for him that it would have for no other man on earth. Amazing that it had, in some form and after all these years, reached him.

  “I can’t believe I’m here,” said someone, and Swagger was pulled from his time travels to see a friend, younger, better dressed, a kind of Dallas up-and-coming executive type in a worsted Hickey Freeman suit, approaching on a beeline to sit next to him.

  “We put the dumbest intern on the JFK squad,” the man said as he shook Swagger’s hand and dispensed with the how-are-you bullshit. “He fields the ten or twenty calls we get each day from people who’ve solved the case and now know for sure the Gypsies were involved with the Vatican and Japanese imperial intelligence.”

  Nick Memphis was now the special agent in charge of the Dallas field office of the FBI. In most instances it would have been a plum assignment, but for him it was a last stop on the way out. His career had topped out when a new director took over the Bureau, heard he was intimately involved with the tragic incident at a huge mall in Minnesota, and wanted him far from headquarters. An assistant, some acid-blooded corpse named Mr. Renfro, had handled the delicate task of prying Nick from his deputy directorship and reassigning him to fieldwork in an office that was big and produced more than its share of cases closed but didn’t need radical shaking up or bold new leadership, just a dozing caretaker to sign the requisitions, approve the budget, and make sure the squads were adequately staffed until he
retired.

  Swagger didn’t say a thing. He knew he’d shaken up his pal with a strange request a few days ago and that Nick had to vent. He let the younger man flail away, unburden himself, get it all out.

  It was typical Swagger, laconic and detached and seemingly camouflaged even if he wore a suit, an off-the-rack khaki rag that resembled a grocery bag on a scarecrow. He had one leg cranked awkwardly over the knee of the other, showing a beat-to-hell Nocona, and looked younger sitting than walking, because when he walked, the vibrations of several competing wound-deficient parts of him turned his progress into a slow and uncertain shuffle. You winced for the pain that hip had to cause him and wondered why the old coot was too stubborn to take painkillers. At least he wasn’t wearing that goddamn faded Razorbacks cap.

  “I can’t believe I wasted a Justice Department witness protection identity on you,” Nick fumed. “Who do you think you are, Mark Lane? It’s over. Oswald did it. Nobody else. That’s what all the sensible research shows, that’s what the latest computer re-creations show, that’s what all the House panels concluded. Only fruitcakes and vegetarians believe in a conspiracy. Man, if it gets out that I bought in to this kind of scheme, Renfro will have my ass on a clothesline by Wednesday.”

  “I appreciate your kindness,” Swagger finally said. “And no, I ain’t gone insane. I think my mind is working normally. Slow, as usual, but normal.”