by Ken Grimwood
Something, somehow, must be done.
He flew to Dallas on the fifteenth, and stopped at the first phone booth he came to in the airport. He thumbed through the O’s and there it was, a listing like any other, though to his eyes the letters stood out from the page as if they had been inscribed in flames:
Oswald, Lee H … 1026 N. Beckley … 555-4821
Jeff wrote down the address, then rented a plain blue Plymouth from Avis. The girl at the counter told him how to find the part of town he was looking for.
He drove past the white frame house in Oak Cliff six times. He pictured himself walking to the door, ringing the bell, speaking to the soft-voiced young Russian woman, Marina, who would answer. What would he say to her? "Your husband is going to kill the president; you have to stop him"? What if the assassin himself came to the door? What would he do then?
Jeff drove slowly past the ordinary little house once more, thinking of the man who dwelt within it, who waited and plotted to shatter the world’s complacency.
He left the neighborhood without stopping. At a K-Mart in Fort Worth he bought a cheap portable typewriter, some typing paper, and a pair of gloves. Back in his anonymous Holiday Inn room off the East Airport Expressway he put on the gloves, opened the sheaf of paper, and began composing a letter that it sickened him to write:
President John F. Kennedy
The White House
1600 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, D.C.
President Kennedy:
It is you who have alienated Premier Fidel Castro and the liberated peoples of Cuba.
You are the oppressor, the enemy of free men throughout Latin America and the world.
If you come to Dallas I will kill you. I will shoot you in the head with a high-powered rifle, and in your spilled blood will be written JUSTICE for the freedom fighters of the Western hemisphere.
This is not an idle threat. I am well armed, and prepared to die myself if need be.
I will murder you.
VENCEREMOS!!
Lee Harvey Oswald
Jeff added Oswald’s home address, drove back across town, and put the letter in a mailbox two blocks from the nondescript frame house. An hour later, and forty miles southeast of Dallas, the gloves were getting sweaty. The tightening leather numbed his hands as he pitched the typewriter off a bridge into a large lake in the middle of nowhere. It felt good to finally pull the damned gloves off, to toss them out the car window near some godforsaken town named, of all things, Gun Barrel. His hands felt freer, cleaner.
For the next four days he stayed in his room at the Holiday Inn, speaking to no one but room service and emerging only to buy the local papers. On Tuesday, the nineteenth, the Dallas Herald had the item he’d been waiting for, on page five: Lee Harvey Oswald had been arrested by the Secret Service for threatening the life of the president, and would be held without bail until Kennedy had completed his one-day trip to Texas at the end of the week.
Jeff got very drunk on the plane back to New York that night, but the alcohol had nothing to do with the triumph he felt, the exultant thoughts that crowded his brain: images of a world in which negotiation took the place of war in Vietnam, in which the hungry were fed, racial equality attained without bloodshed … a world in which John Kennedy and the hopeful spirit of humanity would not die, but would blossom and prosper upon the earth.
As his plane landed, the lights of Manhattan seemed a brilliant portent of the glorious future Jeff had just created.
At ten minutes past one on Friday afternoon, his secretary opened the door to his office without knocking. She stood there with tears streaming down her face, unable to speak. Jeff didn’t have to ask what was wrong. He felt as if he had been struck in the gut by an invisible, heavy object.
Frank came in behind her, quietly told the young woman there’d be no more business conducted today; she and everyone else should go home. He took Jeff in tow, and they left the building together. People milled about Park Avenue in a general stupor. A few wept openly; some were gathered around car or transistor radios. Most just stared blankly ahead, putting one foot absentmindedly before the other in a slow, distracted gait wholly uncharacteristic of New Yorkers. It was as if an earthquake had loosened the solid concrete of Manhattan and no one was sure of stable footing. No one knew whether the streets would tremble and buckle again, or even split apart to swallow up the world. The future had arrived, in one jolting instant.
Frank and Jeff found a table at a hushed bar off Madison. On the television screen, Air Force One was leaving Dallas, the body of the president on board. In his mind’s eye, Jeff saw the photograph of LBJ taking his oath of office, with a dazed Jacqueline Kennedy beside him. The bloodstained dress, the roses.
"What happens now?" Frank asked.
Jeff tore himself from his macabre reverie. "What do you mean?"
"What’s next for the world? Where do we all go from here?"
Jeff shrugged. "I guess a lot depends on Johnson. What kind of president he’ll make. What do you think?"
Frank shook his head. "You don’t guess anything, Jeff. I’ve never seen you make a guess. You know things."
Jeff looked around for a waiter; they were all watching the television, listening to a young Dan Rather recapitulate the afternoon’s momentous events for the twentieth time. "I don’t know what you’re talking about."
"Neither do I, not exactly. But there’s something that’s … not right with you. Something odd. And I don’t like it."
His partner’s hands were trembling, Jeff saw; he must be in bad need of a drink.
"Frank, it’s a terrible, strange day. We’re all kind of in shock right now."
"You’re not. Not the way I am, and everybody else. Nobody in the office even told you what had happened; it was like they didn’t have to, like you knew what was coming."
"Don’t be absurd." A burly police official was being interviewed on TV, describing the statewide manhunt now underway in Texas.
"What were you doing in Dallas last week?"
Jeff eyed Frank wearily. "What’d you do, check with the travel agency?"
"Yeah. What were you doing there?"
"Looking into some property for us. It’s a growth market, despite what’s happened there today."
"Maybe that’ll change."
"I don’t think so."
"You don’t, huh? Why not?"
"Just a feeling I have."
"We’ve come a long way on these feelings of yours."
"And we can go further still."
Frank sighed, ran his hand through his prematurely thinning hair. "No. Not me. I’ve had it. I want out."
"Jesus Christ, we’ve hardly even started!"
"I’m sure you’ll do spectacularly well. But it’s gotten too weird for me, Jeff. I don’t feel comfortable working with you anymore."
"For God’s sake, you don’t think I had anything to do with—"
Frank held up his hand, cut him off. "I haven’t said that. I don’t want to know. I just want … out. You can hang on to the bulk of my share for working capital, pay me back out of profits over the next few years, or however long it takes. I’d recommend you turn my end of the operations over to Jim Spencer; he’s a good man, knows what he’s doing. And he’ll follow your instructions to the letter."
"Damn it, we were in this together! All the way back to the Derby, to Emory—"
"So we were, and it’s been a hell of a streak. But I’m cashing in my chips, old partner. Walking away from the table."
"To do what?"
"Finish law school, I suppose. Make some nice, conservative investments of my own; I’ve got enough to keep me set for life."
"Don’t do this, Frank. You’d be missing out on the opportunity of a lifetime."
"Of that I have no doubt. Maybe someday I’ll regret it, but right now it’s what I have to do. For my own peace of mind." He stood up, extended his hand. "Good luck, and thanks for everything. It was some fun while it lasted."
They shook hands, Jeff wondering what he could have done to prevent this. Maybe nothing. Maybe it had to happen.
"I’ll talk to Spencer on Monday," Frank said. "Assuming the world’s still at peace and the country’s functioning by then."
Jeff gave him a long, sober look. "It will be."
"Good to know. Take care, partner."
When Frank had left, Jeff moved to a stool at the bar, finally got a drink. He was on his third when CBS broke the bulletin:
"… arrested a suspect in connection with the assassination of President Kennedy.
I repeat, Dallas police have arrested a suspect in connection with the assassination of President Kennedy. The man is said to be a drifter and sometime left-wing activist named Nelson Bennett. Authorities say a telephone number found in Bennett’s pocket has been traced to the Soviet Embassy in Mexico City. We’ll have more on this late-breaking story as soon as…"
The patio of the East Side town house was bleak in the late-November chill; it was a place designed for summer, in a world where summer had been banished. The glass-topped table, the polished chrome struts of the lounge chairs, somehow made this sunless day more barren still.
Jeff pulled his thick cardigan sweater tightly closed and wondered, for the hundredth time in the past two days, just what had happened on that unstoppable day in Dallas. Who the hell was Nelson Bennett? A backup hired assassin waiting in the wings when Oswald was arrested? Or merely a fluke of chance, a random crazy, manipulated by forces far more powerful than any human conspiracy in order that the flow of reality not be disrupted?
There would be no knowing, he realized. He faced enough else beyond his comprehension in this restructured life; why should this particular element be less insoluble than all the rest? And yet it mocked him, chastened him. He had tried to use his prescience to reshape destiny in a positive way, something far surpassing the triviality of his wagers, his investment schemes—and his efforts had created no more than a minor ripple in the stream of history. A killer’s name had been changed, no more.
What, he wondered, did that bode for his own future? All the hopes he had of rebuilding his life with the advantage of foreknowledge … were they doomed to be mere superficial changes, quantitative but not qualitative? Would his attempts at achieving genuine happiness be as inexplicably thwarted as his intervention in the Kennedy affair? All that, too, was beyond his ken. Six weeks ago he had felt a godlike omniscience, and his potential for accomplishment had seemed without limit. Now, once more, everything was open to question. He felt a numbing sense of hopelessness worse than any he had known since boarding school, on that terrible day beside the little bridge where he’d—
"Jeff! Oh, my God, come here! They’ve killed Bennett, it was on the TV, I saw it happen!"
He nodded slowly, followed Sharla inside. The murder was being shown again and again, as he’d known it would be. There was Jack Ruby in his B-movie gangster’s hat, appearing out of nowhere in the basement corridor of the Dallas County Jail. There was the pistol, and Nelson Bennett dying on cue, the twisted agony on his bearded face like a distorted reflection of Lee Harvey Oswald’s well-documented death.
President Johnson, Jeff knew, would soon order a full investigation of the events of this bloody weekend. A special commission, headed by Chief Justice Earl Warren. Answers would be diligently sought; none would be found. Life would go on.
SIX
Jeff didn’t involve himself in much after that except making money. He was very good at making money.
Motion-picture stocks were one fairly easy pick. The mid-sixties had been a time of heavy movie attendance and the first multimillion-dollar sales of films like The Bridge on the River Kwai and Cleopatra to the networks. Jeff shied away from small electronics companies, though he knew many of them would multiply tremendously in value; he just didn’t remember the names of the winners. Instead, he poured money into the conglomerates he knew had thrived through the decade on such investments: Litton, Teledyne, Ling-Temco-Vought. His selections were almost uniformly profitable from the day the stocks were purchased, and he plowed the bulk of that income back into still more shares.
It was something to do.
Sharla had enjoyed the fight, despite the fact that she’d perversely bet on Liston when Jeff told her to go with Cassius Clay. Jeff’s reactions to the evening had been decidedly more mixed: not so much to the fight itself, but to the setting, the crowd. Several of the high rollers and bookies in attendance had recognized Jeff from the publicity that had spread through the gambling world after his record World Series win; even some of the men who’d had to pay off large portions of that multimillion-dollar pot gave him wide grins and "thumbs up" signs. He might have been excommunicated from their circle, but he’d become legendary within it, and was accorded all the honor due a legend of that magnitude.
In a sense, he supposed, that was what had bothered him—the gamblers' visible respect was too clear a reminder that he had begun this version of his life by pulling a massive, if unfathomable, scam on the American underworld. He would be remembered forever by them in that context, no matter what his subsequent successes in society at large. It made him want to take a long, hot shower, get rid of the implied stench of cigar smoke and dirty money.
But the problem was something more concrete, too, he thought as the limousine sped down Collins Avenue past the vulgar facades of Miami Beach’s hotel row. It was, specifically,
Sharla.
She had fit right in with the fight crowd, had looked perfectly at home among the other pneumatic young women in their tight, flashy dresses and excessive makeup. Face it, he thought, glancing at her in the seat beside him: She looks cheap. Expensive but cheap; like Las Vegas, like Miami Beach. From the most cursory of appraisals it was clear to anyone that Sharla was, quite simply, a machine designed for fucking. Nothing more. The very image of a Girl Not To Take Home To Mother, and he grimaced to think that he had done precisely that: They’d stopped in Orlando on their way down here for the championship bout. His family had been overwhelmed and more than a little intimidated by the extent of his sudden financial triumphs, but even that couldn’t hide their contempt for Sharla, their anxious disappointment at the news that Jeff was living with her.
She leaned forward to fish a pack of cigarettes from her purse, and as she did so the black satin bodice of her dress fell slack, giving Jeff a glimpse of the creamy expanse of her generous breasts. Even now he desired her, felt a familiar urge to press his face into that flesh, slide the dress up and over her perfect legs. He’d been with this woman for almost a year, sharing everything with her except his mind and his emotions. The thought was suddenly distasteful, her very beauty a rebuke to his sensibilities. Why had he let this go on for so long? Her initial appeal was understandable; Sharla had been a fantasy within the fantasy, a tantalizing pièce de résistance to go along with his restored youth. But it was an essentially empty attraction, as juvenile in its lack of substance or complexity as the bullfight posters on the walls of his college dorm room.
He watched her light the cigarette, her deceptively aristocratic face bathed in the dim red glow of the lighter. She caught him staring, raised her slender eyebrows in a look of sexual challenge and promise. Jeff looked away, out at the lights of Miami across the still, clear water.
Sharla spent the next morning shopping on Lincoln Road, and Jeff was waiting for her in the suite at the Doral when she returned. She set her packages in the foyer, moved immediately to the nearest mirror to freshen her makeup. Her short white sundress set off her glorious tan, and her high-heeled sandals made her bare brown legs look even longer and slimmer than they were. Jeff ran his thumbs along the sharp edges of the thick brown envelope in his hand, and he came very close to changing his mind.
"What are you doing inside?" she asked, reaching back to unzip the breezy cotton dress. "Let’s get into our suits, grab some sun."
Jeff shook his head, motioned for her to sit in the chair across fr
om him. She frowned, pulled the zipper closed over her tawny back, and sat where he indicated.
"What’s with you?" she asked. "Why the strange mood?"
He started to speak, but had decided hours ago that words would be inappropriate. They’d never really talked anyway, about anything; verbal communication had little to do with what passed between them. He handed her the envelope.
Sharla pursed her lips as she took it, tore it open. She stared at the six neat stacks of hundred-dollar bills for several moments. "How much?" she finally asked, in a calm, controlled voice.
"Two hundred thousand."
She peered back inside the envelope, extracted the single Panagra Airlines first-class ticket to Rio. "This is for tomorrow morning," she said, inspecting it. "What about my things in New York?"
"I’ll send them wherever you like."
She nodded. "I’ll need to buy some more things here, before I leave."
"Whatever you want. Charge it to the room."
Sharla nodded again, put the money and the ticket back in the envelope, which she set on the table beside her. She stood up, undid the dress, and let it fall to the floor around her feet.
"What the hell," she said, unhooking her bra, "for two hundred thousand you deserve one last go."
Jeff went back to New York alone, back to his investments.
Skirts, he knew, would be getting shorter for the next few years, creating an enormous demand for patterned stockings and panty hose. Jeff bought thirty thousand shares of Hanes. All those exposed thighs had to lead somewhere; he bought heavily in the pharmaceutical houses that manufactured birth-control pills.
Eighteen months after they’d moved into the Seagram Building, Future, Inc.'s holdings had risen to a paper value of thirty-seven million dollars. Jeff repaid Frank in full, and sent a long personal letter with the final check. He never received a reply.
