Max Collins - Ask Not

“Not ‘matter,’ Shep. Murder.”

“ Maybe murder,” he said with a gap-toothed smile, as inappropriate as it was boyish. “You said yourself it might have been accidental.”

“Then where are the tapes?” I asked. “Her notes?”

“Who knows? As for murder, do you rule out the husband?”

“Not entirely. Frank Felton is a washed-up radio star, a failed producer, who single-handedly lost that breakfast show of theirs while Flo was away. Now he’s inherited that town house, which is already on the market for two hundred grand, plus whatever insurance money and retirement funds come in.”

“But you don’t think he did it?”

“No. Somebody said to me, rightly, that Felton didn’t have the balls. And I also think he still loved her.”

His shrug accompanied a shake of the head. “Men have been known to kill women they loved. Perhaps more than any other kind. And then there’s that young reporter from Indianapolis.”

Our Bunny stopped by, bringing a fresh round; she was a golden blonde named Connie who’d been a Playmate last year.

“Mark Revell is no murderer,” I said. “He’s just a Midwestern kid with stars in his eyes. A nobody who likes to get next to somebodies. A fan. And basically a decent enough kid, if I read him right.”

“So he’s off the suspect list.”

I sipped the gimlet. “Actually, no. There’s a way he could be involved.”

“How is that?”

“What if he were one of your assets?”

“My assets?”

“Well, the Company’s. I mean, he’s a reporter for an Indiana newspaper, but he globe-hops. Rome, Paris, London. Where does he get the money? Yeah, sometimes those junkets are paid for by movie studios, but not usually for a smaller market like Indianapolis. He was in a perfect position to do minor international courier jobs for Uncle Sam.”

“This is getting a little far-fetched, Nate. Surely you can do better.”

“Not so far-fetched. He denies having an affair with Flo, but she made it clear to me, and others, that she was sleeping with the kid. Why would he deny it? What better result for a star fucker than fucking a star?”

“Well, she was married.”

“In a famously open relationship. I think the Company hired this kid to get close to her, to keep an eye on her developing Kennedy story. To seduce her, if necessary, to gain her trust. But here things get murky. What if Revell were asked to lift her assassination notes and her tapes, particularly the Ruby one? The kid worked with her, assisted her, and would know right where she kept such things.”

“I’ll bite. Suppose he did get that assignment. How would he pull it off?”

“With the Company’s help. Dr. Gottlieb or one of your other resident mad scientists cooks up a mickey for Revell to slip Flo, which he does at the Regency piano bar, after the TV broadcast. She gets understandably woozy and he escorts her home. She flops onto her little bed in her office, going to sleep, while her protégé filches the JFK materials. But the mickey the kid has slipped her reacts badly with the booze and the Seconal already in her system — or maybe she wakes up and takes the Seconal, that’s hard to say — and then? That’s all she wrote. Literally.”

“Even that would be an accidental death.”

“Yeah, I guess. A manslaughter-ish kind of accident, though. Or... maybe Gottlieb or one of his cronies had given Revell something lethal to dose her drink with, almost certainly without the kid’s knowledge. My little girl reporter had found out more on her own than the Warren Commission and all its investigators. So maybe it was decided that she had to go.”

“She didn’t do her investigating entirely on her own.”

“No, Mark Lane was there for some of it, but he’s already being discredited as a kook, despite his impressive credentials. But I was there, wasn’t I? Which is why you happen to be in Chicago again, so soon, isn’t it?”

A smile flickered on the boyish face. “Not necessarily. But there is a rumor that, uh... Flo Kilgore gave you a duplicate of the Ruby tape.”

Looked like Uncle Carlos was spreading the word.

“Suppose she did?” I said. “What would it be worth to the Company for me not to come forward with it? To leave buried it and any copies I might have?”

“What would that be worth?”

The jazz combo started in on “I Wanna Be Around.”

I said, “How about a simple assurance from those representing the country that I fought for? An assurance that my life, and my son’s life — and my ex-wife’s life, too, what the hell — are no longer on the line.”

“... That sounds reasonable.”

“And I’ll even throw in my own assurance that I have no intention of taking the assassination investigation any further. I was only sniffing around the edges, after all. I never even met Billie Sol Estes, let alone LBJ.”

But others would pick up those threads. And I would in fact share what I’d discovered with Bobby Kennedy. Then there were the dozen signed statements in a dozen safety-deposit boxes scattered around the country, detailing that Jack Ruby interview, my substitute for the imaginary duplicate tapes with which I’d threatened Marcello.

“Of course,” Shep said lightly, “this is all hypothetical.”

“Of course.”

“Hypothetically speaking, you would have a deal. Would you like to shake hands on it?”

“I don’t think so. I’ll also pass on signing anything in blood, if you don’t mind.” I slid out of the booth. I leaned in like a Bunny doing her trademark dip. “Don’t contact me again, old buddy. We’re done, you and I. I wish you and your family and Uncle Sam well. But we are done.”

“All right, Nate. Consider yourself off the Christmas card list.”

I straightened and nodded and was about to go when I felt his hand on my sleeve.

“One thing, Nate,” he said, giving me that Bobby Morse smile. “Be aware that the Company is very grateful to you for your service in New Orleans.”

“What service is that?”

“Why, tying off any number of inconvenient loose ends for us... Oh, and I’ll get the check.”

The Warren Commission’s final 889-page report was submitted to President Lyndon Baines Johnson on September 24, 1964, concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John F. Kennedy (and wounding Texas governor John Connally). It also found that Jack Ruby acted alone killing Oswald.

Bobby Kennedy nearly lost his Senate bid, his grief and general disengagement in the process costing him dearly. But late in September, his opponent — the normally likable Senator Kenneth Keating — made a bid for the Jewish vote by accusing Bobby of settling a World War II — era case in favor of a company with Nazi ties. Supposedly RFK had done this just to please old Joe Kennedy, whose reputation as a Nazi appeaser still haunted the family. The charge infuriated Bobby, who before had considered Keating benign, and he struck back hard — he had lost one brother to a war, he reminded voters, and another to an assassin’s bullet. It energized his campaign. He won in a landslide, and his path to the presidency seemed clear.

On October 5, 1966, Jack Ruby’s conviction was overturned on technicalities and his death sentence set aside. Around this time, Ruby complained that a “mysterious visiting physician” had given him a series of injections; he also claimed to have received numerous chest X-rays, one lasting upwards of an hour. He succumbed to lung cancer on January 3, 1967, at Parkland Hospital, where both Jack Kennedy and Lee Oswald had died.

While I apparently removed one “cleanup crew,” assassination witnesses continued to occasionally meet premature fates over the next few years. Albert Bogard, the car salesman who gave the Oswald look-alike a test-drive, committed suicide, in February 1966. Lee Bowers, the railroad towerman who saw unusual activity behind the Grassy Knoll fence, perished in a suspicious single-car accident, in August 1966. But most of those Flo and I interviewed survived — S. M. Holland, Mary Woodward, J. C. Price, among others. Witnesses who waited years, or in some cases decades, to come forward fared better.