The Third Bullet Read online

  Still, like all the other rubes, he moseyed down the hill and stood at the curb not seven feet from the X that marked the position of the car when the third bullet hit head. He’d seen it enough to view it with dispassion, but unbidden, a sound cue came to him. He had been near men hit in the head, and he knew that it was a sound like no other on the planet. He didn’t want to, but from some forgotten atrocity in his long and violent past, that noise abruptly reproduced itself. It sounded like a baseball bat hitting a grapefruit, as it held both the thud of power and the squirt of liquefaction. Vapor was left in the air, a cloud of atomized brain particles thick enough to register on Zapruder’s film before it dissipated in the rush of the car accelerating away.

  Swagger shook his head. He hadn’t expected that moment of horror. He tried to clear his brain. He turned, looked up Elm to the cube of the depository with its front of mismatched windows, arc and square and arc and square, now lacking the gaudy Hertz sign that had commanded the heights in 1963, and he saw Lee Harvey’s window 288 feet away and 66 feet off the ground. But he saw another thing. He waited until a traffic light at the corner halted the stream so he was able to walk the seven feet to the X and turn and look back.

  The other thing he saw was a building. It was also a brick box, and it was just across Houston from the depository. From this angle, its seventh-story window was but a few feet to the right of Oswald’s nest. Any fair computerized trajectory cone, imprecise to begin with, would have included it too.

  It was the Dal-Tex Building.

  Because the writer had spent an afternoon there, Swagger next found himself in the local history room of the Dallas Public Library on Young Street a few blocks from his hotel on Commerce. The library itself, which seemed to match City Hall across the street, appeared to resemble a spaceship crashed into the earth. It was a kind of inverted or upside-down pyramid thing, and each floor addressed the world through a line of wide, deep windows. It was so old-fashioned modern.

  The room on the fifth floor was any other library room, in fact nicer than most, and the young woman behind the counter couldn’t have been nicer herself. Swagger was following James Aptapton’s notebook and explained that he’d like to see the Dallas Yellow Pages from 1963, and in seconds, literally under a minute, he was sitting at a table with a copy of the Dallas Yellow pages, not merely from 1963 but from November 1963.

  As serious research, it was probably pointless. But he saw that the writer would use it as a source by which to re-create the city of 1963. It probably helped him if he knew what the cab companies called themselves, where you took your dry cleaning or went to meet your refrigeration or photography needs, where you’d go to get a nice tan overcoat, what the phone number of the Texas Book Depository was (RI7-3521) or that there were eight pages of churches but only one strip club—Jack Ruby’s Carousel, “across from the Adolphus.” He learned that you could eat Mex at El Fenix or buy liquor from a Mr. Sigel, who had stores everywhere, or stay at the Statler Hilton or the Mayfair or the Cabana as well as the Adolphus; buy a straight-up drink at the Tabu Room or the Star Bar or the Lazy Horse Lounge; buy ammo for your gun at Ketchum and Killum on Kleist, in Oak Cliff, or Wald’s; buy a book at the North Dallas Book Center, hear a song on KBOX or KJET or KNOK. Yes, a storyteller might find all this interesting, but it quickly drained Swagger of interest and his eyes glazed over in a bit. He hung around on sheer willpower, so that he traced exactly the writer’s footsteps.

  Leaving, he hailed a cab. African cabdriver with a little magic box for getting directions, so the fellow had him on his way to 1026 North Beckley, in Oak Cliff, in seconds. That destination was noted in Aptapton’s little book, and Swagger knew it to be the location of Oswald’s roominghouse in the six weeks before the assassination. A writer would have to see such a thing and know for sure, as Swagger soon learned, that it was a wooden box under trees with a scruffy yard off the main drag of Zang Boulevard, that it had a mansard roof concealing what had to be a small upper story, that it was deep, probably much bigger than it seemed from North Beckley Street, containing many small rooms, one of which had housed the creepy young killer. Nothing marked its place in history. It sat among other decaying wooden houses on a block that seemed to be slipping into disrepair and possibly into something he had never heard of until he started reading—that is, existential despair. It held no mysteries for Swagger.

  He directed Mr. Ruranga to drive farther down Beckley to Tenth, for that was the route of Oswald’s last walk as a free man. Oswald had thundered down Beckley with seemingly no direction in mind, then turned on a street called Crowley, which led him to another turn down Tenth. Swagger had forgotten Crowley and settled for Tenth. When they reached it, it turned out not to go through, so the driver had to mull around until he found a way around the church parking lot that now barricaded it. That route led to the bleak street where Oswald had been confronted by the police officer, right before the corner of Tenth and Patton, and Oswald had hit three of his four shots, all fatal. No plaque marked J. D. Tippit’s falling place among the rotting bungalows and uncut lawns, just a whisper as dry leaves caught in the persistent Texas wind rushing over the earth. It seemed so wrong.

  Then it was a brief shot up Oak Cliff’s main drag, called Jefferson, to the low strip of commercial buildings that held the Texas Theatre. The theater was still there and still called Texas and recognizable from a million reproductions of photos taken at 2:30 p.m., November 22, 1963, when the surly young man with the snub-nosed .38 Special was taken down by Dallas Homicide, getting a shiner in the process. In retrospect, he was damned lucky he didn’t get a .357 in the thoracic cavity, as the Dallas cops in those days weren’t particularly merciful to cop killers.

  Again, the theater held no fascination for Swagger. It was just an old building, and its deco stylings spoke thirties, not sixties, and its marquee in Spanish suggested that a new wave of inheritors had moved in.

  Swagger ordered the cab back to the Adolphus, because it was, happily, nap time.

  The nap never arrived. Not even with lights out and shades down would sleep approach. Too much danced in his brain.

  Conspiracy theory. Second shooter. Third shooter. Triangulation of fire. All that Oliver Stone stuff. How could you think about this thing at all with all the crap around it? You couldn’t see the target, there was so much camouflage, some of it deceitful, some of it well meant, some of it earnest, some of it crazy. CIA. Castro. From deep within the government. The trilateral commission.

  He told himself: Think hard. Think straight. Concentrate.

  Could there have been a second gunman elsewhere in Dealey? How do you attack that proposition? There was no reason why there couldn’t have been one, from a gunman with a rifle in his umbrella to a guy on top of the TBD to someone on one of the other buildings that ringed the square, Dal-Tex or the Records Building or even the Criminal Courts Building.

  But . . . What am I missing?

  What am I missing?

  He had nothing. Then he had something.

  Most if not all of the multiple shooter/grassy knoll theorists proceeded from a fundamental lack of rigor, under false assumptions. Most assumed, sloppily, that what became known on November 22, 1963, was known before that. It was not. You have to discipline yourself, when thinking about this shit, to limit your thoughts to what was known on November 22 and not after. Most of them had not been able to do that.

  There was one unassailable fact: only one bullet was found that could be associated with the murder of John F. Kennedy. That is what is called an anomaly. Swagger knew from too much experience that many shootings feature anomalies: things that could not be predicted, that could not be expected, that were seemingly impossible. Yet they happened, because reality does not care what people think or expect.

  No sane planner could have assumed that only one bullet would be found, WC399, the later-to-be-famous “magic bullet.” Any planner utilizing multiple shooters (i.e., personnel on the grassy knoll) would have to assume that bu
llets from their firearms would be recovered as well. The odds certainly favored that outcome. If that was the fact, why bother to use Lee Harvey Oswald as a “patsy”? Why not do the job straight out, like a Mob hit, and make a break for it after the last shot? Why not use an automatic or a semi-automatic weapon and put a burst on target instead of three shots separated by several seconds each? A good man with a Thompson at the grassy knoll could have killed everyone in that car in two seconds. The only reason to have a single shot fired from the knoll was the false-flag operation, to set up a chump. Why would you do that if your own assumed-to-be-recovered bullet would give that away quickly? The deceit that Oswald was the only shooter would last, it had to be assumed, until an autopsy surgeon removed a bullet from JFK’s brain, or Mrs. Kennedy’s left shoulder, or John Connally’s lung, or the upholstery of the limo.

  Any “other-shooter scenario” without some kind of ballistic deceit, meant to link whatever really happened with Oswald’s Mannlicher-Carcano 38, was utterly dismissible on its face. It was even surprising that such craziness wasn’t laughed off the face of the earth when it was first theorized, though nobody in the press knew enough about rifle ballistics to catch on.

  He sat back. That seemed solid. He looked at it a thousand ways and couldn’t see through it or around it. It was okay.

  Progress? Maybe a little.

  And tomorrow. To make sure it was there, he picked up the Aptapton notebook and noted what the writer had inscribed in a careful hand: “National Institute of Assassination Research, 2805 N. Crenshaw.”

  CHAPTER 4

  As is true of many grandly named enterprises, the National Institute of Assassination Research was located in somebody’s basement. The house was shabby, with shedding shingles, in another decaying Dallas prewar bungalow neighborhood, a one-story wreck that hadn’t seen paint or putty in too many years. The glass-and-steel spires of New Dallas seemed a long way away from this broken-down zone. As Swagger walked through the gate in the cyclone fence on a sidewalk smeared with wet leaves, he noted a sign that said “Bookstore in Back.” He followed that around and found a stairway down to another sign that instructed him to “Ring Bell,” which he did.

  “Come on in, it’s open,” came a shout.

  He walked into a room jammed to bulging with bookshelves, all of them ominously creaky and distended from load-bearing responsibility as their fibers struggled with the tonnage of pages they were asked to contain, the whole thing musty and basement-smelling. The shelves were indexed by handwritten-on-tape topic labels: CIA, RUSSIA, RIFLE, LHO EARLY, LHO LATE, WARREN COMMISSION PRO, WARREN COMMISSION CON, DOCUMENTS, WITNESS ACCOUNTS, FBI, JACK RUBY, and so on and so forth. Bob looked for one called DAL-TEX, but didn’t see it. He moseyed, unmonitored for a good deal of time, pulling this or that tattered paperback from a shelf, tracking the conspiracy theories from Mafia to KGB to Castro to MI-Complex to Big Oil to Far Right, none of them particularly motivating.

  The stuff felt like an undertow; it could suck you in and in minutes you were annealed into the gel of conspiracy, your clarity gone, your logic-gyro hopelessly out of whack, your ability to distinguish this from that eroded into nothingness. Too much information; which of it was trustworthy, which dubious? Too many claims and assertions, too much speculation, some out-and-out lies for profit. In all, as if some madhouse virus of paranoia had been set loose, infecting all who breathed it.

  “Hi, there,” a voice said. “Sorry, I was trying to catch up on shipping. Can I help you?”

  The man was tall and gangly, a kind of seedy academic with a matting of thick blondish hair and glasses held to his head by an elastic strap, now pushed back into his hair. He wore a tatty green crewneck sweater under a tweed jacket that had some mothholes flagrantly displayed on the lapel. Mid-forties, no commando type, his hollow, pale cheeks bristly with day-old beard. He smiled, introducing the fact that he hadn’t discovered tooth-whitening strips, and extended a long-fingered hand. Bob shook it, discovering as he’d anticipated that it was slightly squishy and moist, and smiled back.

  “Well,” Bob said, “I seem to have a bug in my head that’s saying ‘Dal-Tex’ over and over again. If there was a second rifle, it had to be there, given a bunch of other factors. I thought you might have books on it. I thought you might have a file.”

  “Ah,” said the proprietor of NIAR, “very interesting.”

  “I stood at the Elm Street X, and I couldn’t help but notice how close its trajectory is to the Sniper’s Nest.”

  “Agreed. Many, many folks have found that fascinating.”

  “I’m sort of late to this game, so forgive me for my ignorance. I’m guessing that a lot has been thrashed over, gone through, shaken out, and I don’t want to waste my time doing what someone already did in 1979.”

  “I don’t blame you, friend,” said the man, settling easily into a conversational posture by resting his rear on the counter and crossing his arms. “Especially now. You know, with the fiftieth coming up, we’re anticipating a big surge in interest and attention. It seems like Stephen King isn’t the only guy working on an assassination book. I’m aware of a great deal of activity.”

  “I’m no writer,” said Bob. “Lord knows, I couldn’t string two words together if my life depended on it. It’s the puzzle aspect of the thing, the pure solution, that is so damned fascinating.”

  “I hear you,” said the man. “I’m Richard Monk, and I guess I’m CEO and janitor of NIAR. Also shipping clerk, accountant, and lightbulb replacer. It’s pretty damn glamorous.”

  Bob got out his wallet and pulled a card, handing it over.

  John P. Brophy (Ph.D.) (NSPE)

  “Jack”

  Mining Engineer (Ret.)

  Boise, Idaho

  “Spent my life digging holes all over the globe,” he said. “It’s pretty boring in a tent in Ecuador, so I started reading when I wasn’t digging or sleeping or drinking or whoring. I’m still reading. About three years ago, I noticed I had five or six million bucks ticking away and declared myself retired. I got hooked on JFK and have been digging into that. It seems to have taken over my life. I read your website for news every week. Anyhow, I finally worked out some stuff of my own and thought I’d come to town to check it out, see if it stands up to reality.”

  “So you’re a Dal-Tex guy. I could put you in touch with a couple of other big Dal-Texers.”

  “Well . . .” said Bob. “Yes, but I am cautious—”

  “I get it. You’ve got a theory, it’s your intellectual property, you don’t want it getting out. All of us are like that, halfway between hungering to share and fearing being ripped off. I’ll go easy, no problem.”

  “You know everybody and everything?”

  “I am the Kennedy assassination,” Richard said, laughing. “I live and breathe this stuff, Jack. And I have the unfortunate problem of a photographic memory. If I read something, it’s there forever. Or at least so far. Maybe it’ll reach a point where one more fact makes my head explode.”

  Swagger laughed. Richard Monk was engaging, if weird, and didn’t have that suspicious, feral quality that so many in the “assassination community” seemed to have.

  “Offhand, what’s the state of the art on Dal-Tex?”

  “Well, for a time the people who owned it were generous in letting researchers tour it if they made an appointment. Their policy has changed lately, I suspect because of the fiftieth, and the attention is ginning up, and they’re trying to rent out a lot of office space. I know the building manager; I might be able to get you in.”

  “That would be great,” said Bob.

  “To be honest, you shouldn’t expect much. The whole thing has been gutted and rehabbed twice over since ’63. Now it’s modern, you know, kind of ‘lofty,’ very chic urban Greenwich Village vibe happening. They even built an atrium into the lobby that goes up all the way through the center of the building so it looks like the Bradbury Building in L.A. Very old-movie cool, but completely disconnected from 1963
.”

  “The windows are still where they were?”

  “Absolutely,” Richard said, “and of course you’ll confirm that certain windows line up almost perfectly with the angle and the trajectory of the head shot allegedly taken by LHO that day.”

  “Good. See, I get into it through the guns. I’m a shooter. I actually did a lot more hunting than whoring and drinking and feeling sorry for myself, and I’ve seen a lot of animals and even some men die when hit by a high-powered bullet, or even, believe it or not, a low-powered six-point-five. My work has been on guns and ballistics, and now the problem is to make it fit the possibilities of the day.”

  “Got it. See, I think it’s good that you don’t come into it with the preset conviction that ‘The CIA Did It’ or ‘Dallas Right-Wing Oil Bastards Did It,’ because that skews your thinking.”

  “Exactly.”

  “You know what, Jack? I’m way behind in my shipping. I more or less survive by mail order. Man, without the Internet, I’d be trying to get by on a major’s pension from Big Green.”

  “Army?”

  “Intel. Twenty years, mostly Germany. Anyhow, I’m thinking maybe we ought to meet for dinner and talk there. Is that something you’d be up for?”

  “Only if it’s on me.”

  “Great. Better than I hoped for. Where you staying? I can at least come to you.”

  “The Adolphus.”

  “Oh, then the French Room,” Richard said airily, and Swagger knew it was a joke, for the French Room was the swanky hotel’s glamorously decadent restaurant.

  “Seriously, go down one block to Main, go up Main, there’s a great Mex place called Sol Irlandés.”

  “Got it,” said Swagger.

  “See you at eight. It’s an easy walk.”

  “Okay,” said Richard, after a long grateful swallow of Tecate, “I didn’t bring the file, because I am the file. But when you come back, I can pull all the pictures and references for you, or I can attach it to an e-mail and ship it to you, whichever.”