Max Collins - Ask Not

I looked at it. Simple and straightforward, it required my signature and for Tonahill to pay me “the sum of $1 and other good and valuable consideration.” He handed me a pen and I leaned the page against the closed elevator door and signed it.

Handing the contract back to him, with one of my cards, I said, “I’ll want a photostat of that for my files.”

“Certainly,” he said, and his smile was as tiny as he wasn’t. He pressed the elevator button with a forefinger that made it disappear.

“You’re forgetting something,” I said.

His tufted eyebrows rose. “Oh?”

“Where’s my dollar?”

He grinned and got out his wallet and I was slipping the buck in my pocket when the elevator doors dinged open. We got on board and Tonahill pressed 6-M.

Soon we were stepping into a vestibule and facing an office with E.L. HOLMAN, CHIEF JAILOR in black-edged gold on a light-brown door. We did not enter the office. Instead, a deputy at a barred gate at right recognized Tonahill, nodded, and allowed us into a narrow hallway. The deputy stayed at his post while Flo and I followed Tonahill, moving down the straight path to another gate and another deputy. Three more deputies were on the other side, the quartet of deputies the literal guards at Ruby’s gate. Two of them sat at a little metal table in the white-walled windowless end-of-the-corridor space, which opened up into what might have served as a reception area, with another office door at left and a steel door at right. They were playing cards with their charge.

“Gin!” Jack Ruby said, and, hearing the metal grind and whine of the gate opening, threw his cards in and got to his feet with a smile. “Miss Kilgore. Nate Heller! What a pleasure to have such high-class company.”

Ruby came over quickly, his thinning hair slicked back George Raft — style, his face freshly shaved. He looked a little like Uncle Fester, minus the lightbulb in his mouth, the black pajamas traded in for trim white short-sleeve jail coveralls, though his loafers and socks were Addams Family black.

He took Flo by the hand, in a gentlemanly way, as if about to ask her for the first dance. “This is such a rare, wonderful opportunity.”

He didn’t say whether that applied to him or her.

Then Ruby offered me a sweaty hand to shake, and I did, as he said to Flo, “You may not know this, but Nate and me go back to the West Side. We grew up together.”

That was an exaggeration, of course, but not exactly a lie.

“How’s Barney?” he asked, walking us over to the metal table, which the pair of deputies had vacated. They had left the cards behind. Tonahill was still standing near the gate, where all four deputies had now gathered, like flies around offal.

“Barney’s doing fine,” I said. “I’m grateful he arranged this.”

Ruby waved that off. “Anything for Barney. He raised a hell of a lot of dough for my defense.”

“He’s going to do the same for your appeal, he says.”

“What a stand-up guy. What a stand-up guy. Listen.” He leaned in and whispered to me. He smelled of Old Spice. His eyes were like black buttons sewn onto his face, only buttons blinked more. “I can’t let that lawyer sit in. I don’t know if I trust him.”

“You haven’t fired him.”

“Not yet. But this meet is strictly for you and Miss Kilgore. This is a one-of-a-kind interview, Nate. You are about to sit down with history. You want some water? I don’t think I can talk them into coffee or anything, unless you’re still here at lunch.”

“No water, thanks,” I said, and Flo said the same.

Tonahill hunkered in conference with one of the deputies, the oldest of the quartet. Then he came over and towered over us and said, “They’ve arranged for you to use room 7-M upstairs. It’ll be more comfortable.”

There was something accusatory in Ruby’s pasty face as he said, “That’s where Justice Warren interviewed me.” He said this looking at Tonahill, then he turned to me and repeated it.

I said quietly, “I’m ahead of you, Jack. What do you see as our options?”

Ruby had already thought that over. “There’s a visiting room on this floor, but I don’t trust it any more than 7-M. That holding cell over there...”

He nodded toward a cubbyhole with its barred door swung open.

“... is where I sleep and do my personal business.”

He meant piss and shit.

He was shaking his bullet head. “Not appropriate for Miss Kilgore. Crowded and not what I would term pleasant — though I don’t see how they would bug it.”

I nodded. The only bugs in there would be cockroaches. But Jack was right, it wouldn’t do.

Then I turned to Tonahill, who stood anxiously nearby like a guy waiting for an estimate from a shady auto mechanic. “Joe, see if you can get those deputies to stand down the hall a ways, on the other side of that gate. We’re going to have our little talk with Jack right here.”

Tonahill thought about that for maybe two seconds, nodded, said, “Okey dokey,” and went over and ran it past the deputies. One went off to check with the chief jailor, but we went ahead and set up shop. I moved the little metal table flush against the far wall, and arranged Flo’s chair so that her back would be to the deputies and Tonahill. I sat across from Ruby, who gathered the cards and set them to one side.

Tonahill got the okay, and he and the deputies positioned themselves on the other side of the gate, close enough to keep us in sight, far away enough to provide the privacy we needed.

Flo got the portable tape gizmo out and asked Ruby for permission to record him.

“Please,” he said, nodding, so worked up he blinked once or twice. “Be my guest.”

Then he folded his hands before him as if about to say grace and waited for the interview to begin.

Flo had a little notebook she was checking in, to make sure she hit every subject on her mind, and Ruby blurted, “Not everything pertaining to what’s happened has come to the surface, you know.”

“Is that right?” she said, flipping through pages, still getting ready.

“The world will never know the true facts of what occurred, my motives, unless you can get the story out. I trust you, Miss Kilgore. And Nate and me, like I say, we go way back — like me, he’s had dealings with certain kinds of underworld types without ever selling his soul to them.”

With a serious smile, I asked, “You never had to make that bargain, Jack? Isn’t that what brought you here?”

His customary expression was that of a guy who just had water splashed in his face. “You got a point, Nate. I’m not sayin’ you don’t have a point. These people who have so much to gain and such an ulterior motive for... for putting me in the position I’m in, they’d do just about anything to keep the true facts from coming out to the world at large.”

Flo finally jumped in. “Are these people in very high positions, Jack?”

“Yes.” He unfolded his hands and, not hard, pounded a fist on the metal tabletop, making the deck of cards jump a little. “Yes!.. You know, I tried to tell the truth to the Warren Commission.”

She nodded. “Jack, I do know. I got an advance look at your testimony. But you told Justice Warren the same story you’ve been telling — about committing the crime for the sake of Jackie and Caroline Kennedy, to spare them the hardship of a trial.”

A tiny smile flashed. “Don’t you think I would make a good actor?” Now the high forehead clenched and he leaned in. “That was a story, Miss Kilgore, that my first attorney instructed me to tell. From the start, I wanted to tell the truth, but I couldn’t, not here in Dallas. Not in this jail. I told Justice Warren, if they wanted to get the straight story out of me, they had to take me to Washington, D.C.”