Max Collins - Target Lancer

“You will dig this, Nate,” Eben said. “You really will.”

“What’s it like around the office these days?”

“A morgue, only more depressing. Martineau’s had three meetings so far, reminding us to stay mum about that week you were with us.”

I shook my head. “First time I saw those Dallas cops dragging Oswald through that police station, I thought he was Vallee. My God they look alike.”

And when I’d been watching Sunday morning and saw the stocky figure in the fedora lurch forward and fire his gun into Lee Harvey Oswald, I knew it was Ruby. Didn’t have to see his face. Just the shape of him.

“Here’s some more cheap irony you’ll enjoy,” Eben said. “Mayor Daley got the city council today to rename the Northwest Expressway the Kennedy Expressway.”

“Yeah, I saw. They should have the ribbon cutting at the West Jackson exit.”

“Actually, they are.”

“Aw, please.…”

“Swear to God, Nate. Next week. There’ll be a ceremony with more Irish politicians than an alderman’s wake. Bobby Kennedy was invited, but declined.”

“Yeah, he’s keeping his head pulled in. I don’t think you’ll see him doing much traveling in the foreseeable future.”

I had warned him. We had a talk, a late-night phone call, from “a secure line” Bobby said, Saturday, November second. I hadn’t told him chapter and verse-I’d left out specific names, like Richard Cain and Jack Ruby-but I did tell him what had really happened at IPP, and that I believed Operation Mongoose was riddled with cancer cells.

“I know, Nate. We’re looking into it. We’re all over it.”

“Bob, do me one small favor. Convince your brother to stay out of open cars for a while.”

“Can’t do it, Nate. You try telling him. We have an election to win. We’re okay. We know what we’re dealing with.”

“Do you?”

Eben said, “Something else I heard, and this you will simply not believe.”

“Pretty sure I will. I have a low disbelief threshold these days.”

Even though nobody in this mostly Negro crowd gave two diddleys what we were saying, Eben leaned in and damn near whispered.

“On the Monday before the assassination,” Eben said, “the eighteenth? The Service was dealing with a serious threat in Tampa for the President’s visit. An FBI source indicated an unidentified sniper in a high window in a tall building, with a high-power rifle with scope, would try to take JFK out.”

I noticed Barbara had a rather long-suffering look on her lovely face. Who could blame her?

“They even had a suspect,” her husband was saying, “a former defector named Lopez. Part of the Tampa Fair Play for Cuba Committee. Sound familiar?”

“That’s who Oswald was with in New Orleans, it’s claimed. So they had an Oswald … a Vallee … ready to go in Tampa, too?”

“Nate, they were stalking the President all month. All damn month.”

“I figured that we’d shut the thing down,” I said, with an Atlas-worthy sigh. “But Chicago was just Plan A. There was a Plan B in Tampa, and Plan C in Dallas.”

Barbara said, “Third time’s a charm.”

A cute waitress came and took our orders; she seemed fascinated by me, like a Martian had walked in the place. I couldn’t quite tell if she was flirting or afraid. We all had beer, and that was the last JFK talk for a while, unless you counted Muddy Waters singing “Sad, Sad Day.”

When the band took its break, I said, “I dig this electrified blues. I think it could give rock ’n’ roll a run for the money.”

“When the white kids hear it,” Barbara said, “they’ll steal it.”

Eben said, “Nate, I don’t care what Martineau says. I’m going to testify at the Warren Commission.”

The papers and TV had been full of that all day-LBJ establishing the President’s Commission on the assassination of President Kennedy.

“Ebe, don’t even think about it. Allen Dulles is on that damn thing-former CIA director? It’s a dog and pony show, full of people who hated Kennedy. Stay away from it.”

“Somebody’s got to come forward. What can they do to me?”

“Fire you,” Barbara said.

Ebe smiled at her and patted her hand. “Honey, I can always get a job with Nate Heller.”

* * *

If only it had been that easy.

The winter day in 1964 when Eben Boldt went to Washington, D.C., to testify to the Warren Commission, both about the covered-up Chicago plot and the misconduct he’d witnessed on the President’s protection detail-the drinking, the carousing, the racism-he was arrested and sent back to Chicago. The accusation? He had supposedly tried to extort $50,000 out of a counterfeiter by sharing a secret file with him.

This book would be at least one-hundred pages longer if I were to share with you the work the A-1 did pro bono for Ebe’s various attorneys over the years. Even when I was able to get the counterfeiter to recant, to admit having perjured himself on the stand, Eben Boldt remained behind bars. Despite the Supreme Court reviewing the serious misconduct of a judge who’d advised the jury that the defendant seemed guilty, behind bars Eben remained. The counterfeiter, by the way, was a close associate of Mad Sam DeStefano. I always suspected Dick Cain of being behind the frame-up.

When he was paroled in 1969, Eben did not return to law enforcement. He didn’t even want the job I offered him. Instead he became a quality-control supervisor in the automobile industry. For forty years, he has attempted to clear his name. Documents at the Chicago Secret Service Office that might have cleared him-concerning, among other things, the Chicago assassination plot-were “routinely” destroyed in 1995. His efforts and those of others to get Congress and/or the President to restore his good name have also failed. To date.

I like to think Marty Martineau didn’t have anything to do with the railroading of Eben Boldt. He continued his distinguished government service for many years, but when asked about the four-man assassination squad-or about the lone nut, Vallee-he was vague and even evasive. Still, he was one of the few Secret Service agents willing to go on record saying that the JFK assassination was a conspiracy. He died at ninety-five.

On December 3, 1963, Thomas Arthur Vallee briefly surfaced in Chicago newspapers covering the brave cops who had seized the “Gun-Toting Kennedy Foe.” Charges against him were never pressed. On the rare occasions when Vallee was tracked down by a journalist-fascinated by such details as Oswald having also served at a U-2 base in Japan-the interview subject insisted he’d been framed by his CIA handlers, and seemed to realize that he’d narrowly escaped the role that Lee Harvey Oswald played in history. Still working as a printer, Vallee died in 1988 in Houston, where he lived in a ramshackle trailer with a well-oiled M-1 propped near his bedside.

Berkeley Moyland, the honest Chicago police lieutenant who alerted the Secret Service to Vallee, was instructed by the Secret Service in late 1963 never to share his knowledge of the Chicago assassination attempt. But in his final years, he told his son the story, adding that Vallee had later sent him a thank-you card. Apparently the ex-Marine believed Moyland had saved his life.

The two cops who had been so highly recommended by Sheriff’s Chief Investigator Richard Cain gained notoriety in a later case. In December 1969, the pair-acting as state’s attorney raiders-burst into black activist Fred Hampton’s apartment, kicking the door down, showering the place with bullets, and killing Hampton and another Black Panther leader. The detectives spent years in and out of court, fighting claims that they were CIA or FBI agents on a “black op,” an ironically apt euphemism for this incident, widely termed a massacre. Whether they are alive or dead, I couldn’t tell you. But the last time I saw Gross, he was gray and nervous, his family life ruined under a crush of massive legal bills.