Max Collins - Ask Not

With a grin, I asked, “This Colonel Byrd is one of your Texas oil tycoons?”

“You could say that. He’s a co-owner of Ling Electronics, among other things. Admiral Byrd’s nephew, you know.”

The elevator shuddered. We had reached the sixth floor, just as it was occurring to me that if this building had been controlled by a conspirator, that would provide an assassin (or assassins) easy access.

To America this floor was history, but to the book depository, just warehouse space still in use (though no one was around right now but us) with boxes of books piled high and making corridors among the open rafters and beams and brick walls. Arched windows let in plenty of dust-mote-streaming light to reveal that the place was a fairly disorganized-looking, messy affair, the building a dingy nonentity, particularly considering its celebrity status among other American edifices.

“Old building,” I said to the manager, as he led us toward the Elm Street side. “I assume the School Book Depository’s been here a good long while.”

“Oh, no, Mr. Heller. We only moved in last year. A few months before the tragedy, actually.”

Wasn’t that interesting?

The area near the window from which Oswald was said to have shot — the “sniper’s nest” — was literally roped off, with metal folding chairs as occasional hitching posts. Flo had told the manager we just wanted a brief look and he stood by patiently, a respectful distance away, while we stepped over the rope like gate-crashers.

There wasn’t much to the nest — just a wall of books blocking any view of someone standing, or crouching, at the window, plus a two-box stack by a box propped on the sill, an apparent arrangement for a sniper to steady a rifle against them. Nearby was another book box that could have been used as a seat by Oswald, as he waited for his target to roll by.

Flo was watching me; she’d seen all this before. “What do you think, Nate?”

“I think it’s a farce. The idea of trying to shoot out that window with those boxes in the way, plus that water pipe by the window? Nuts.” I jerked a thumb to the left. “Can we check out the next window over?”

“Of course.”

It was just as I’d thought. This window was a view onto Houston meeting Elm, where the President’s limo had slowed almost to a stop. I pointed my finger where the car would have made its slow curving turn, thirty-five yards below.

Bang.

Oswald wouldn’t have needed a second shot from this perch. Or at least, I wouldn’t have. I wouldn’t have needed a rifle with a scope, either — I could have used my goddamn nine-millimeter Browning automatic. If it hadn’t been tucked away in the trunk of the Galaxie, I might have used it for a little dramatic show-and-tell for Flo’s benefit, although the depository office manager might not have dug it.

“You may be right,” I told her, “about Oswald being a patsy. He sure as hell didn’t shoot Kennedy from that supposed nest — or if he did shoot, he sure as hell didn’t hit him.”

She frowned at me in thought. “So that sniper’s nest — it’s all theatrics? To cover what the real murderers were up to in the... kill zone, you called it?”

I nodded. “Oswald may have been a conspirator, and he may have been a nut, too, for all I know. But he was not a lone nut.”

She was nodding slowly.

Still at the window, I pointed down. “Anyone positioned in this building, intent on killing Kennedy, would have shot him when that limo made its left turn, with the target facing the shooter. You don’t wait till a target is going away from you, and nearly out of sight, before shooting.”

“ Somebody was seen shooting from the other window, by a number of witnesses. One or two identified Oswald.”

“Well, I’m not saying Oswald or somebody didn’t shoot from that window. It only makes sense, though, one way.”

“Which is?”

“Multiple shooters. Your Grassy Knoll, for sure. Dal-Tex maybe, or some other tall-building rooftop... Let’s let your nice friend over there get back to work.”

We headed toward him, smiling. He smiled back.

Quietly, Flo asked, “What do you suggest we do next, Nate?”

I gave the sniper’s nest a dirty look as we passed it. “Something more worthwhile.”

“Such as?”

“Talk to some strippers.”

“Janet Mole Adams Bonney Cuffari Smallwood Conforto,” Janet said with a shrug, in response to Flo’s request for her full name. “What can I say? I been married a few times.”

She tapped her cigarette into a tray and released twin dragon fumes of smoke from her nostrils. The redhead, who — like her questioner — had her pile of hair pulled back in a ponytail, was sitting in a booth in the Colony Club, well before opening... just two closer to the restrooms than Mac Wallace’s booth had been.

Janet had agreed to talk to Flo and me, as well as to arrange for several other Carousel Club veterans to do the same, one of whom was due here later.

I was on the other side of the booth sitting next to Flo, across from the lovely if slightly ill at ease Janet, and between us on the tabletop was a silver-and-black Sanyo micro-pack portable tape recorder, with reel-loaded cassettes that recorded twenty minutes, then flipped over for another twenty. It was like something out of James Bond.

Janet was in a pale green blouse and darker green shorts, wearing minimal makeup. She looked good that way, but like the club around us, wasn’t done any favors by the lights being up. She was twenty-seven or — eight, and looked ten years older. She was smoking Salems.

Flo asked, “How long have you known Jack Ruby?”

“I never met Ruby before June of last year,” she said. “He came and caught my act at the Sho-Bar in New Orleans, and offered me a gig on the spot. Said he’d never seen a sexier act. Said he’d pay big money for me to headline for him, twice what he paid any other dancer.”

I asked, “Doesn’t Carlos Marcello own the Sho-Bar?”

“I don’t know who owns it,” she said, shrugging again. “But his brother Pete hired me, so maybe that tells you something. As for Ruby, he was a loon from word go, but headlining in a Dallas club appealed to me. My ex and me had a club go bust in the French Quarter not long before, and I was on my own again, so it was a chance for a new start.”

Flo asked, “How did it work out?”

“Well, the Carousel never did draw like the Colony. But me, personally, I did great with the audiences. Ask Nate — men go crazy over me. But that Ruby could be a horse’s ass. He hires me because I’m... uninhibited onstage, right? ‘The sexiest thing I ever saw,’ he says. Then I go to work for him and he shuts the lights off on me and docks my pay for being ‘raunchy,’ when all I did was flash a little gash... uh, what I mean to say, Miss Kilgore, is... give the occasional customer a little peek under the G.”

“He docked you for being too wild onstage?”

“Yeah, and I said if he didn’t pay up, I was gonna sue him and then he threatened me.”

I said, “With violence?”

“Oh yeah. I took him to court on a peace bond over it. He was a hothead, ask anybody. One of those guys with a ‘little man’ complex. If some a-hole was causing trouble in the club, he wouldn’t let his bouncer take care of it, no, he had to toss the bum down the stairs himself.”

“Did he ever hit you?”

“No, but I thought he might. And he carried guns around all the time, waved ’em around, and I mean, he was obviously a little unstable.”

Flo asked, “Unstable enough, hotheaded enough, to kill Lee Harvey Oswald out of love for Kennedy?”

“Oh, he didn’t love Kennedy,” she said with a snort of a laugh, a fresh cigarette in her mouth as she lit herself up with a little silver Zippo. “He hated the Kennedys, Bobby particularly. I don’t know where they get that garbage about how he was trying to prevent Jackie from...” She played it melodramatic. “... the heartache of a trial !”