Max Collins - Ask Not

His skills of observation remained keenly honed, too.

“You talked to Bill Queen in the Manhattan office,” I said.

“I did. Also, over recent months, Miss Kilgore has received a lot of attention for her columns on the assassination. Thanks to her celebrity, she’s the most credible of those conspiracy kooks.”

“She’s not a kook,” I said, but didn’t add that it was a conspiracy.

“Is getting into that area wise, you think, after what happened?”

“After what happened?”

He sat forward, on the verge of losing a usually kept cool. “After you and your son almost got run down! Tell me you weren’t looking into other loose ends down there that got conveniently clipped off.”

The image of a once-pretty dishwater blonde floated across my mind — Rose Cheramie.

“I don’t keep much from you, Lou, but this time it might be better all around if—”

“Nate,” he said, shifting in his chair, “we just landed a huge insurance paycheck for a client by sniffing at a suspicious suicide tied to a bunch of suspicious suicides in Texas. We still have your friend Mac Wallace under surveillance in Anaheim, and—”

“Keep him that way.”

“How long?”

“Indefinitely. It’s okay, Lou. I get a good rate. I have an in.”

“Nate, it’s just... what are you getting yourself into? What are you getting the agency into?”

I raised a hand in a gesture that was half stop and half peace. “Lou, I have been encouraging Flo to shut down her investigation. She has more than enough to write a hard-hitting piece of journalism that will get her the respect she craves, and maybe make some useful waves.”

“That sounds dangerous.”

“Potentially it is, but it’s also potentially very high profile, and our role in it won’t hurt business one little bit.”

He sighed, nodded, leaned back. “You said you were encouraging her to shut it down, though?”

“Right. I’m meeting her in New Orleans two weeks from today for a few follow-up interviews, and then I promise you I will either convince her to write ‘thirty’ to this thing, or walk away.”

He was shaking his head. “Nate, I’m just an old Pickpocket Detail dick.”

“Right. You’re an old dick. I get that.”

“I feel like I should give you some fatherly advice right now, but you’re a little old for that, and I’ll be damned if I know what it is. What’s in New Orleans, anyway?”

“Besides Carlos Marcello, you mean? Possibly some of the people who killed Kennedy, or who helped kill him.”

“Jesus.” He shook his head again. “Jesus H. Christ. You’re going to get us all killed.”

“No. Honestly, Lou. I’m on top of this. Really.”

“Okay,” he said. He reached over and collected my empty coffee cup, just helping out his wife. “Okay... Uh, listen. It may not mean anything, but Mac Wallace isn’t in California.”

“What?”

“He flew out Saturday morning to Dallas. Does that matter? Your family is in LA, you’re in Chicago, your friend Flo is in New York. Who does that leave in Dallas?”

Fourteen or fifteen witnesses we’d interviewed.

From the doorway, Lou said, “We don’t have anybody in Dallas to watch the guy. There are agencies in those parts we could contact. What do you say?”

“No, I’ll make a call myself. Have one of our LA men determine when Wallace is due back in California and pick him up then.”

“You’re the boss.” He pointed at me and then at himself. “Now, if you get killed, then I’m the boss, right?”

“Right.”

“Okay then,” Lou said.

And he left me there with my apprehensions.

Coming into the office this morning, settling behind my desk in my inner sanctum, had given me a nice feeling of normalcy. As if everything that happened in Texas had been an episode, like a show on TV, and the show was over, the set clicked off.

But one of the witnesses, Rose Cheramie, was dead, just three days after we talked to her. Rose was a junkie and the kind of woman who could get herself killed lots of ways. But had we gotten her killed? Had I?

Clint Peoples wasn’t in, but he called me back after lunch.

“Nate,” the familiar mellow, folksy voice said, “I got some additional information for you, on the Cheramie woman’s death, if you’re interested.”

“That’s one reason I called.”

“Driver in question, a Mr. Jerry Don Moore, from Tyler, was heading home. Comin’ up level with a roadside parking area, he noticed three or four suitcases strewn on the highway, spillin’ over the yellow line. He swerved right, to miss them, and then there in front of him was a woman lyin’ prone on the shoulder, at ninety degrees to the road, head on the road, like the pavement’s her pillow. He braked, says he doesn’t know for sure if he hit her or not.”

“How’s that possible?”

“Moore says there was a sound, but it mighta been a shoe brake hitting on his old beater — it’s got bald tires and a single headlight. The fella admits to speeding, and drinking, by the by. Some colored folks stopped and helped him, moving the suitcases, putting Rose in his backseat. Moore took her to a doctor he knew in Big Sandy, who got her to Gladewater Hospital, where she was DOA. Cause of death... let me give it to you exact... ‘traumatic head wound with subdural and subarachnoid and petechial hemorrhage to the brain caused by being struck by an auto.’”

“Hardly a surprising diagnosis.”

“Maybe so, but Nate — there was also a ‘deep punctuate stellate wound above her right forehead.’ Now, this type of injury—”

“I know what type of injury that is, Clint.”

The result of a contact gunshot wound, the star-shaped wound from the bursting, tearing effect on skin of gasses trapped against flesh.

“Other odd thing is, Highway 155, where she was found? That’s a farm-to-market road, runnin’ parallel to US Highways 271 and 80. She’d have had a much better chance of hitchin’ a ride on either of those.”

“She was killed elsewhere and dumped.”

“Not much doubt about that — for one thing, she had tire tread tracks on her damn head... and that junker’s tires are bald, remember. Also, her estimated time of death was nine hours before she was admitted to Gladewater.”

“What now?”

“Well, despite these anomalies, I’m afraid my sister organization, the Texas Highway Patrol, has already closed the case.”

“Shit, that’s a little fast, isn’t it?”

“The officer in charge couldn’t establish a connection between the driver and victim, and Rose’s relatives do not wish to pursue the matter. If I may be blunt, Rose was a junkie prostitute, and those girls find imaginative ways to die each and every day. Wish I could say Mac Wallace doesn’t have an alibi, but he’s got one, all right — he flew from sunny Cal into Dallas on Saturday, and Rose died Friday.”

“That was the other reason I called, Clint — to make sure you knew Wallace was back on your turf.”

“As I mentioned the other day, we do keep track of the boy.”

“I’m glad to hear that, because I don’t have an A-1 office in them there parts to keep an eye on the bastard. I think I may have mentioned we’ve been maintaining surveillance on him in Anaheim.”

“Well,” he sighed, “can’t promise the Rangers are watching him as close as all that, but I have made a sort of hobby out of Mr. Wallace. You have any particular concerns?”

“Miss Kilgore and I talked to a number of assassination witnesses, who seem to be a vanishing breed, to put it in Texas terms.”

“You mean, more than a few folks are comin’ down with a bad case of suicide?”