Max Collins - Ask Not

On a less somber note, my son Sam did take over the family business. His flirtation with rock ’n’ roll ended after he got kicked out of Gary Lewis and the Playboys when Jerry’s kid signed a national recording contract. Like Jerry’s kid, Sam wound up in Vietnam, much to my dismay, which is one of the reasons LBJ should be burning in Hell, and I don’t mean Bourbon Street. Sam survived the experience, but like his old man, war left its mark.

In August 1966, in San Francisco’s Candlestick Park, the Beatles gave their last live performance. The Colony Club closed its doors in April 1972. The Chicago Playboy Club, once the world’s most popular nightspot, shut its doors in the summer of 1986. The Sho-Bar is still open for business in New Orleans (although in a different location).

In 1998, a Texas-based assassination research group presented evidence that a fingerprint, unidentified since its discovery in 1963, had at last been positively ID’d. The unknown print came from one of the boxes making up the so-called “sniper’s nest” on the Texas School Book Depository’s sixth floor. A certified fingerprint examiner, unaware of the context, made a fourteen-point match with a print from a long-suspected participant in the assassination — a print made when that suspect had been booked on a murder charge in 1951.

I can’t tell you whether or not Lee Harvey Oswald ever knelt at that window in the book depository sniper’s nest.

But Mac Wallace did.

Despite its extensive basis in history, this is a work of fiction, and liberties have been taken with the facts, though as few as possible — and any blame for historical inaccuracies is my own, mitigated by the limitations of conflicting source material.

Ask Not is the third novel in the Nathan Heller JFK Trilogy, preceded by Bye Bye, Baby (2011) and Target Lancer (2012).

Most of the characters in this novel are real and appear under their true names, although all depictions herein must be viewed as fictionalized. Available research on the various individuals ranges from voluminous to scant. Whenever possible, actual interviews with the subjects have been used as the basis of dialogue scenes, although creative liberties have been taken.

Nathan Heller is, of course, a fictional character, as are the people he works with at the A-1 Detective Agency. In some cases, I have chosen not to use real names as an indication that either a surfeit of research is available on some minor historical figure, or that significant fictionalization has occurred. Joseph Plett, for example, has a real-life counterpart about whom little research was available beyond the details of his death and his association with Billie Sol Estes.

Flo Kilgore was introduced in Bye Bye, Baby as a composite of journalists Dorothy Kilgallen, Peter Hyams, James Bacon, and Florabel Muir, reflecting their respective roles in the investigation that followed Marilyn Monroe’s death. Here Kilgallen is the sole historical counterpart for Kilgore, although the fictional character does not entirely parallel the real person (Kilgallen, for example, was a Catholic and married only once).

Kilgore’s husband, Frank Felton, has a counterpart in Kilgallen’s husband; and her assistant, Mark Revell, similarly has a real-life counterpart, although both characters should be viewed as fictional. Heller’s theory regarding Flo’s death has a basis in views expressed in Lee Israel’s biography Kilgallen (1979) and the article “Who Killed Dorothy Kilgallen?” by Sara Jordan ( Midwest Today , 2007), both of which also provided general Kilgallen background.

As far back as the first Nathan Heller novel, True Detective (1983), I have intended that my detective would one day delve into the Kennedy assassination. Long before I began writing professionally, I had a strong interest in the case, and vividly remember seeing on television Lee Harvey Oswald hustled around the station by Dallas police. My reaction as a teenager was that when Oswald said he was a patsy, he wasn’t lying. I also saw Oswald shot by Jack Ruby when it aired live.

Generally I come to Heller novels with an open mind, following the research wherever it might lead; but I admit that where JFK’s murder is concerned, I long ago formed my basic opinions about the case, based upon voluminous reading. Nonetheless, I was prepared to change my mind.

That did not happen. Prior to the writing of Target Lancer, my longtime research associate, George Hagenauer, and I devoured scores of books on the assassination, and in the year preceding the writing of Ask Not went through several more shelves of research works. The idea of doing a novel exploring the dead witnesses in the murder’s wake sent me down several false trails — this book was extensively re-plotted perhaps seven times in the weeks leading up to the start, and several more during the writing itself.

As with Target Lancer, my original game plan here — to begin with the probable murder of Lt. Cmdr. William Pitzer as the case injecting Heller back into the Kennedy assassination (see Without Smoking Gun, 2004, Kent Heiner) — was reluctantly discarded with the discovery of the Chicago aspect of the Billie Sol Estes “cleanup” suicides. Out of the fog enveloping the JFK tragedy emerged Malcolm “Mac” Wallace, and the final path for Ask Not revealed itself.

The greatest liberty I have taken here is time compression, particularly as it applies to Wallace, Kilgallen, and Cheramie. The latter two did not die until 1965, and Wallace’s death — although fairly accurately portrayed here as a puzzling if satisfying mix of vehicular accident and carbon monoxide suicide — did not occur until 1971. For the sake of effective storytelling, I allowed Nate Heller to deal with Wallace in the compressed time frame presented here.

References for Wallace included Blood, Money and Power (2003), Barr McClellan; LBJ: The Mastermind of the JFK Assassination (2011), Phillip F. Nelson; The Men on the Sixth Floor (2010), Glen Sample and Mark Collom; and the seminal if controversial A Texan Looks at Lyndon (1964), J. Evetts Haley. Wallace is also a topic in Madeleine Duncan Brown’s autobiography, Texas in the Morning (1997) — a decidedly weird book combining soft-core romance-novel sex with shocking political revelations. The Henry Marshall case and much more is dealt with in Captain Clint Peoples, Texas Ranger (1980) by James M. Day.

I make no pretense that this is a definitive work on the assassination — however based in fact, Ask Not is historical fiction on the one hand and, I hope, an entertaining, thought-provoking private eye thriller on the other. For the most part, I have limited Heller to gathering information uncovered by researchers during the era depicted, although this has not been a hard-and-fast rule. Nonetheless, there were countless moments when I omitted material because I did not feel Heller could logically obtain it in 1964.

As much as possible, I like to present Nate Heller in a role occupied by a real person (or persons) in history. For example, his participation in the formation of Operation Mongoose is based upon the real role played by private detective Robert Maheu, as detailed in his memoir, Next to Hughes (Robert Maheu and Richard Hack, 1992). After stepping down as attorney general, Robert Kennedy indeed hired trusted investigators from his rackets committee days to quietly look into the assassination. Heller’s initial visit to Carlos Marcello at the Town and Country Motel and Churchill Farms is based on real-life private eye Edward Becker’s encounter with the Louisiana godfather, as described in Mafia Kingfish (1989) by John H. Davis and The Grim Reapers (1969) by Ed Reid. Davis is also a general source for the Marcello material in this novel.