Max Collins - Ask Not

Janet said, looking from me to Flo, “There’s another reason I asked Bev to talk to you. Something that doesn’t have to do with the Carousel Club. She was there. ”

I said, “Where?”

“At Dealey Plaza. She saw the assassination, Nate. Right there on Elm Street. Ringside seat.”

Bev was nodding, and Flo’s eyes were so wide, I thought they’d fall out of their sockets.

“Tell us, please,” I said.

“It happened right in front of me,” Bev said quietly. Her eyes were looking into the memory. “I had a brand-new movie camera that my boyfriend gave me — Larry worked for Eastman Kodak — and I wanted to make sure I could get some really good pictures of the President. I’d been to a party the night before and took a cab over there that morning. My car was already in the parking garage next door, here.”

She gestured with a thumb.

“Anyway, I start walking up Commerce, looking down the side streets to see if I could get a place close to the curb. It was just absolutely packed. There’s no way to even get up close enough to see him, let alone take film of him. I keep walking and walking, oh at least ten blocks to Dealey Plaza, across from what they’re calling the Grassy Knoll now.”

She shifted in the booth, sighed, and Janet gave her a supportive little nod. The girl was trembling but her voice was strong, clear.

“I got lucky and found this area where almost nobody was standing — by a father and his little boy — and I thought, ‘This is gonna be a great place to get pictures!’ And I start filming as soon as the motorcade turns onto Elm Street.”

Flo asked, “When you heard the first shot, did you react? Did the camera shake?”

“No, I never even knew that Mr. Kennedy had been shot until the... the fatal shot. That was definitely a different sound. There was a bang, bang, bang and then a buh- boom. The bang, bang, bang sounded like those little firecrackers people throw on the sidewalk. Then I saw the whole back of his head come off, and the blood flying everywhere.” She swallowed. “I guess I went into a state of shock, then. Everybody else is on the ground, and I’m still standing there, frozen, with my camera in my hand, like a doofus.”

I asked, “Did you think the shots had come from the book depository?”

“No,” she said firmly. “But there was smoke drifting over the picket fence. At the time, frankly, it never occurred to me it was gun smoke. I figured there was a car in that lot that started up. But people went running up the hill. You mentioned the book depository, and even people from there, they were running down to that Grassy Knoll.”

The girl paused, as if shock was settling in yet again.

Flo asked, “What did you do next?”

“I... I walked across the street to the little slope, where everybody was gathering. I saw some people who kind of looked official, taking people and talking to them. I thought, ‘They’re gonna want to talk to me in a minute,’ and I hung around a while, but nobody approached me. I made eye contact with a Dallas cop I knew from the Carousel. I could tell he recognized me and figured, if they needed me, he’d know where to find me. So I left, without anybody questioning me, and went to my car. I didn’t hear that the President had died until I got out on North Central Expressway.”

Janet said, “Tell them about the two men who came to see you at the club the next day.”

“Actually,” Bev said, “it wasn’t the next day. I didn’t go to work Friday night — I don’t think the Colony was even open, but I didn’t go. I didn’t come here to work Saturday night, either, and of course I didn’t go to work Sunday night, after what Jack did to Oswald.”

She sipped at a glass of water we’d provided.

Then she picked up: “Monday night, I got here at my normal time, a quarter till eight, and there were two men waiting at the landing halfway up the stairs. I wasn’t concerned because a lot of times people going to the Colony would wait there for the rest of their party to catch up. As I got to the landing, the taller of the two men stepped forward. He showed me FBI identification. Said, ‘Young lady, we understand you were taking pictures when the President was killed.’ I said, ‘Yes sir, I was.’ Said, ‘Have you had the film developed yet?’ I said, ‘No sir, I haven’t.’ Said, ‘Where’s the film?’ I said, ‘Still in my camera.’ Said, ‘Where is your camera?’ I said, ‘In my makeup kit, right here in my hand.’ It was a train case, and I held it up. He said, ‘Well, we want to take that film and develop it and look at it for evidence, and we’ll get it back to you in a few days.’ That was November 25, of last year, and that’s the last I heard of it.”

Employees of the Colony Club were drifting in — waitresses, bartenders, musicians, a few dancers. The clink of glasses accompanied the lights coming down, transforming the dreary-looking club into the kind of classy venue that Jack Ruby would so dearly love to run.

“That’s an incredible story,” Flo said.

“Really,” Bev said, with a shrug, “it’s simple — I was down there that day standing between twenty and thirty feet from the President when he was shot. I was taking a movie that three days later was confiscated by a man who identified himself as an FBI agent. All there is to it.”

I said, “And you’ve never told anyone before?”

“No,” Bev said. “Mr. Heller, Janet said I could trust you. That you are a good man. And of course I know Miss Kilgore from TV.”

“You could’ve cashed in on the free publicity,” I said.

She gave me a look wiser than her years. “Mr. Heller, if they can kill the President of the United States, they could kill a two-bit songbird like me and it wouldn’t even make the back page of the newspaper.”

Over the next several days, Flo Kilgore and I interviewed a dozen witnesses. I had no part in lining any of them up, nor did she reveal to me how she had done so. I gathered it had been accomplished with the help of her friend Mark Lane and his people, but I didn’t ask. I wasn’t the lead investigator. In fact, I was just a glorified bodyguard.

Toward that end, and properly sobered by the interviews with Janet, Rose, and Beverly of the infamous Carousel Club, I was carrying the nine millimeter again, despite my lack of a concealed weapons permit. This meant, in rather warm Texas weather — did this state know it was goddamn fucking November? — I had to wear a suit, a lightweight tan number courtesy of a Maxwell Street tailor who knew how to allow for a clunky handgun in a shoulder holster under the left arm.

A number of the witnesses went over the same ground, chiefly people present that day in Dealey Plaza who had seen puffs of smoke and other suspicious activities around the picket fence on the grassy knoll.

Like Lee Bowers, a railroad towerman for the Union Terminal Company, who the morning of the murder saw three unauthorized cars enter the parking lot, drive around, and leave. One driver was using a walkie-talkie. Bowers also saw two strangers — one middle-aged and heavyset, in a white shirt and dark trousers, the other in his mid-twenties in a plaid shirt, standing ten or fifteen feet from each other — both near the picket fence around the time of the shooting. He also reported seeing “a flash of light or smoke or something” that caused him to feel that “something out of the ordinary happened by that fence.”

Like building engineer J. C. Price, who was standing on the roof of the Terminal Annex building at the south end of the plaza, opposite the Grassy Knoll, who saw a man running, fast, away from the fence toward the railroad yard, carrying something that looked like a rifle.