Max Collins - Ask Not

I was nodding. “He certainly didn’t have any trouble waltzing into that police station the morning they moved Oswald.”

“No.” She made an openhanded gesture. “But now he sits in a Dallas jail cell, where every dirty cop in town can get to him. If he talks, and not just his usual gibberish, he can wind up as dead as Oswald. As dead as Jack Kennedy.”

“What do you want from me, Flo? Besides the bodyguard gig.”

She placed a hand on my shoulder. Her eyes were intense in a different way now. This was a personal gaze, from one friend to another. From one lover to another.

“Nate, you grew up on the West Side of Chicago. Your best friend was Barney Ross, and Barney was, and is, a good friend of Jack Ruby’s. I finagled a very short interview with Ruby at his trial. Nate, Ruby likes me. He’s a fan of What’s My Line? ”

“He’d make a great ‘mystery guest.’”

For once she didn’t laugh at a dumb gag of mine. “I want to talk to him again. In depth. Away from his jail cell. But he’s been politely declining through his attorney.”

Melvin Belli, one of the top defense men in the nation.

I shrugged. “I’m not that tight with Jack. We aren’t really friends. I did a job for him, a long time ago, but...”

“But Barney Ross is still a good friend of Ruby’s. If Barney put the word through that Jack should talk to me, and that you will be along as Barney’s surrogate, maybe... just maybe ... I can get the interview that will crack this case.”

She had a hell of a reporter’s mind, this kid from Indiana, this game-show celebrity, this gossip columnist.

Shaking her head, she was saying, “I know it sounds unbelievable, Nate, but I am convinced there was a conspiracy behind Jack Kennedy’s murder.”

Should I tell her that she was preaching to the choir? That last year I had helped the Secret Service shut down an attempt on JFK’s life that had been mounted in early November, just twenty days before Dallas? That the players had been the same — the Mob, rogue CIA, exiled Cubans, right-wing crazies?

She was saying, “My source inside the Warren Commission says the results are going to be laughable. They are all too anxious to show that Lee Harvey Oswald was a lone, unaffiliated assassin, and Ruby a psychopath who, by the way, has no real connection to the Mafia.”

I shook my head. “I know the government’s been selling the lone-nut theory on Oswald, but how can they deny Ruby’s connection to the Mob? He’s a mobster, for Christ’s sake.”

“The whole thing smells fishy to this girl reporter. Nate, it’s too convenient and simpleminded that some nut kills the President of the United States, then escapes from that little trifling matter to kill a policeman, only to be apprehended in a movie theater under circumstances that defy every tenet of police procedure, then to be murdered himself under extraordinary circumstances.”

“Well, yeah.”

“I’ve been digging, Nate, and I’ve come up with incredible stuff, starting with the police log that chronicles their minute-by-minute activities. Police Chief Curry was in the first car of the motorcade, and when he heard the shots, his first command was to get a man to the top of the overpass and see what happened there.”

“I’ve never heard this.”

“Of course not. Because the next day, Chief Curry told the press that the shots had come from the Texas School Book Depository, and that his first order had been to surround and search that building.”

I frowned in thought. “But in reality his first real concern was the overpass and that grassy slope the President’s car was moving toward when the fatal shots were fired.”

She was nodding, nodding, nodding. “At about eight miles per hour, yes. Here’s something else for you to chew on. The police radio description of Oswald came from an eyewitness, a Howard Brennan, a steam fitter sitting on a concrete wall more than a hundred feet from the sixth-floor corner window that Oswald supposedly shot from.”

Then Flo told me a darkly amusing story about how she and her husband Frank had reenacted the assassination from a window of their swanky five-story town house in Manhattan.

“Frank used a broomstick for a rifle,” she said, “and I went down and outside to East Sixty-eighth Street. I stood approximately where the steam fitter had, hoping none of the neighbors were watching, and let me tell you, Nate, describing a suspect seen from that distance proved impossible.”

“This was in broad daylight?”

“Yes, and the steam fitter claimed he saw Oswald walking around inside the depository, with no change in height when he came over to fire his shots. Well, it’s been definitely proven that the assassin had to kneel to fire.”

“Interesting.”

“Oh, Nate, and there’s so much more! I’ve got evidence indicating the rifle used wasn’t a Carcano but a Mauser — there was a fucking switch! And do you really think it’s credible that Jack Ruby killed Oswald out of love for Kennedy?”

“All mobsters hate the Kennedys.”

“Right! Or that Ruby, the biggest police buff in Dallas and probably the Mob’s payoff man, never even met Officer J. D. Tippit?”

I shifted on the hard stone of the bench. “Honey, you do understand this is a risky road you’re heading down?”

She snorted a laugh. “Do you really think they’d kill a celebrity?”

“Ask Jack Kennedy.”

The rotating sculpture was making a slight squeak above the gentle lap of the reflecting pool.

“Listen,” she said, softly, “I understand the danger, better than you know. Hell, I have eighteen phones in my town house, and I’m convinced every one is tapped! Or do you think I’m paranoid, like some people do?”

“I don’t. I think this is chancy as hell, and if the kind of people are involved that seem to be involved... you might want to walk away.”

She shook her head. “This story isn’t going to die as long as there’s one real reporter alive.” She sighed. “Nate, I know the perils.”

“Perils? This isn’t a Saturday matinee serial, Flo.”

“You think I don’t know that? Why do you think I was so happy to see you walk back into my life?”

“My charm? My smile?”

That did make her laugh, a musical ripple that went well with the reflecting pool. “Well, of course, darling... but mostly I want a big strong man to be my bodyguard, though I do need you to do a better job than you did for Mayor Cermak.”

“That doesn’t set a very high standard. But have you had death threats? Or damnit — has someone tried—”

“No! No. But there’s a disturbing pattern emerging just the same, as I dig deeper into this morass.”

I frowned again. “What kind of pattern?”

“A pattern of death. Probable murders, and outright ones. Faked suicides.”

I felt the back of my neck prickle, as it had in Captain Peoples’s office.

“Some of the witnesses I wanted to interview, Nate, aren’t available — they are conveniently deceased. Would you like a rundown? Probably just a partial one, because I don’t know of everyone involved, not yet anyway.”

“Please.”

The day after the assassination, Jack Zangretti — an Oklahoma mobster who ran a lavish illegal casino and motel — informed friends, “A man named Jack Ruby will kill Oswald tomorrow, and in a few days, a member of the Frank Sinatra family will be kidnapped just to take some attention away from the assassination.” Frank Sinatra Jr., was kidnapped for ransom on December 8, 1963, making national headlines. No such headlines were made when simultaneously Zangretti was found floating in a lake with bullet holes in his chest.