Man of Steel

by Dave Conifer

  “Chances? Chances with what?” He mouthed “Pomeroy” at Reno, who had sat up on the bed.

  “Don’t ever call me at the office again,” Pomeroy said. “That’s the worst place you could call me.”

  “All right,” Jonas said, growing more confused. “Can we come by your house tonight?”

  “That’s the second-worst place. I’ll meet with you one time and I’ll tell you where. Make sure nobody follows you. I mean it. Look around carefully whenever you can. Once you get there, watch for a few minutes to make sure there’s nobody tailing you.”

  “Who would follow us?” Jonas asked. He was excited, confused and worried all at the same time.

  “Who’s ‘us’?”

  “I’m working with a reporter from Texas.”

  “What’s her name?”

  “Abby Reno, from The Austin Statesman.”

  “I guess that’s okay,” Pomeroy said. “Grab a pencil. Here’s where we’re getting together. It’ll be the first and last time we ever meet.”

  -- Chapter 7 --

  At three o’clock Jonas and Reno left the hotel through the front door. They walked seven blocks along Third Avenue, entered the Steel City Trolley station and boarded the car marked ‘Strawberry Square’ just as the doors groaned shut. The trolley crawled out of the station and picked up speed before disappearing beneath the streets. When it emerged from underground they were on the other side of the Monongahela River. Passengers came and went during the ride but there were never many others sitting in the car with them. The ride continued through several more stations, staying underground when in downtown and riding along the surface in less dense areas. When the trolley stopped forty minutes later they recognized the station as the one where they had originally boarded. They’d ridden the entire circuit. “Are we sure we got our instructions right?” Reno whispered.

  They knew they had when Pomeroy walked onto the trolley, looked around carefully and then took a seat behind them. “This is the last time we do this,” he said.

  “Hi Mr. Pomeroy,” Reno said. “I’m Abby Reno from The Austin Statesman.”

  “We have to keep this short,” Pomeroy answered. “I’ll do most of the talking. Don’t turn around. And you’re not to use my name or refer to me in any way. I don’t exist.”

  “We understand,” Reno answered solemnly.

  “I’m talking with you this one time, and only because I’m sure you won’t go away if I don’t. I know you know all about what I was doing in 1963, or you wouldn’t be here. Eventually you’ll get all this anyway. At least if it’s coming from me I’ll know nobody’s filling your head with nonsense that could get me into trouble. But this is it. You will leave me alone after this,” Pomeroy directed. “For your own good as well as mine.”

  “Why so secretive?” Jonas asked. “You don’t believe a word that Mark McBride says anyway.”

  “I don’t,” he said. “We’ll get to that. He’s a con-artist and you two are his latest marks. But just because he’s a liar doesn’t mean that nobody pays attention to him. The truth is that you’re not going to break any stories based on anything Charlie’s kid told you. All you’ll do is call a lot of attention to where it isn’t wanted.”

  The trolley pulled into another station and a small group of passengers bustled past. Jonas lost his focus as he watched them descend on two rows of seats in the back of the trolley. When he looked back Pomeroy had a look on his face that said ‘Get on with it.’

  “McBride said his dad fired shots at the president,” Jonas said in a near whisper. “Are you telling us that it isn’t true?”

  “And supposedly it came out of Charlie’s diary, right?” Pomeroy asked. His voice had a haggard, scratchy quality, making him seem older than he was supposed to be. “The CIA was behind it, if I remember what he was claiming last time.”

  He paused. Jonas could see his reflection in the window as he looked carefully at the group that had moved to the back a moment earlier. “You never know who might be here with us,” he said. “Yeah, he tried spinning that one a few years ago but nobody bought it. He must have jazzed it up this time, right? Well, I can’t imagine Charlie wrote anything like that. And I know for sure he had nothing to do with any shooting.”

  “Is it true that you and Charles McBride were Dallas policemen, at least?” Reno asked.

  “Yes, that much is true,” Pomeroy said. “We joined up the same week in September 1963.”

  A man in an old-fashioned conductor costume appeared through a doorway in the front of the trolley car and walked down the aisle nodding at passengers. As soon as he was gone Pomeroy resumed speaking. “You really need to understand that there’s no story here. Don’t let his son talk you into this.”

  “Then why are we meeting in an underground trolley?” Reno asked.

  Pomeroy sagged in his seat. “I only want to live my life out in peace. I’m tired of this. I really need this job. I have a wife who depends on me.”

  Jonas waited until he could see that Pomeroy had looked up again before asking another question. “Did you and Charles McBride know each other before you were policemen?”

  “No, we met on the job.”

  “How long had he been on the force when you were hired?” Reno asked.

  “About two days. We were hired the same week. It was odd. Neither of us had any law enforcement experience.”

  “Really? Did you wonder why they would they hire two inexperienced guys?” Jonas asked. “Especially at the same time?”

  “Of course I did. And there were a lot more than the two of us,” Pomeroy said. “The pay was triple what I was making so I took the job without asking any questions.”

  “What were you doing for a living?” Jonas asked.

  “I was selling men’s clothing in a department store downtown.”

  “Nice qualifications,” Reno noted sarcastically.

  “My qualifications were about the same as the rest of the guys I was in with,” Pomeroy said. “We had a unit full of guys with no experience.”

  “Didn’t you think that was weird?” Reno asked.

  “What were we going to do, turn it down? It was good money, and who wouldn’t want to be a policeman?”

  “What kind of things did the unit do?” Jonas asked.

  “Training, mostly. Handling firearms, stuff like that. It was pretty exciting for a guy like me. We were isolated from the rest of the force but I figured it was because we were still in training. Never did work with anybody else. But we weren’t complaining.”

  “Were you on duty when JFK was shot?” Reno asked.

  “No. I was in the building when Lee Harvey Oswald was killed, though. I’m sure you already know that.” Jonas looked instinctively at Reno, who was already nodding her head at Pomeroy. “It was a Sunday morning. Some captain called me the night before and told me to be there. They were moving Oswald from the city jail to the county jail. I was part of the group that was guarding an entrance to the underground garage. That’s where he was shot, down in the garage. Once I was down there I just followed orders. And that’s about all I know. The rest comes from that kid’s imagination. So I think we’re done now. I left the force a few weeks after the shootings.”

  “Why did you quit?” Jonas asked.

  “I didn’t quit. A week or so after Kennedy and Oswald got shot we were told we were going to be let go. The entire unit was disbanded. They didn’t say why. The next day I was out of work, but not for long. The very same day a man from the Eastern Steel Company came by my apartment. He said they needed people with police experience for security. He offered me a job on the spot.”

  “Didn’t you think that was odd?” Reno asked.

  “You keep asking that. Again, I was a young guy with a wife and no job. I followed the money. The only catch was that I had to move to Pittsburgh. They needed me right away. And that’s the end of the story.”

  “That explains why you moved up here,” Jonas observed. “How long did that job last?”


  “I still have that job. I’ve had it since December 1963.”

  “How about McBride?” Jonas asked. “Did he get hired too?”

  “I lost touch with him. The next time I thought about him was in January or February when I heard he died. His house burned down.”

  “Kind of weird how ERC was suddenly interested in you,” Reno said. “You only had a few weeks of experience.”

  “I got lucky that year,” Pomeroy said. “I never questioned it. Those kinds of things always even out.”

  “You never even thought about why you were all hired at the same time?” Reno asked.

  “Charlie and I talked about it. We found one thing we had in common. We both sent in lots of letters to a newsletter called LIFELINE. I was a real right-wing tough guy back then. Turns out that Charlie sent a lot of letters in too. Maybe they were looking for guys with certain tastes in reading,” he said with a shrug.

  “Let’s go back to the transfer of Oswald at the police station,” Reno suggested. “It didn’t work out too well, did it?”

  “We were told not to let anybody down that ramp into the basement,” Pomeroy said. “So that’s what we did.”

  “Including Jack Ruby?” asked Reno.

  “Including everybody.”

  “Ruby walked down the Main Street ramp from the street level, according to the Warren Commission Report,” Reno said. “Was that the entrance you were at?” Jonas turned to her with raised eyebrows.

  “That’s all speculation,” Pomeroy snapped in a voice had that became suddenly loud and hoarse. “I don’t even remember. Are you one of those people that believes anything they read? Nobody could know for sure how he got down there. Maybe he was pretending to be a reporter. They were all over the place. But anyway, I’ve told you all I know. I left the force a few weeks later.” His back slapped against the seat as he exhaled heavily.

  Conversation stopped when the conductor returned and ambled through the car. When the trolley pulled into the next station moments later, Pomeroy stood up. “I’m out of time,” he said before walking up the aisle and out the door. They watched out the window as he hurried to the end of the platform and disappeared up a flight of stairs without looking back.

  “I didn’t know you were such an expert on the assassination. It really shook him up that you knew so much. I think he knows something,” Jonas said.

  “We’ll never see him again,” Reno answered. “He certainly made that clear, didn’t he?”

  ~~~

  After the Pomeroy interview both Jonas and Reno flew back to their respective homes. Jonas rushed into Burkhardt’s office to tell him everything that Pomeroy had said. “Clear as mud,” Burkhardt said. “Try writing something up whenever you get a chance. You’ll probably come up with ten different directions you need to go in. This may be bigger than we realized. Or not. But let’s get it right. Work on it whenever you can squeeze it in.”

  Jonas was disappointed that Burkhardt’s sense of urgency was fading just as his own was on the rise, but he did as he was told. He forced himself to focus on routine work, not all of which had been taken on by colleagues as it turned out. Before long the JFK story was a pile of paper on the corner of his desk to be looked at whenever there was time.

  ~~~

  “Hi Abby,” Jonas said when she reached him at his desk a few weeks later. “How’s it going out there?”

  “It’s going,” she said. “Hey, are you doing anything with the JFK story?”

  “It’s on the back-burner. I look through my notes once in a while but that’s about it.”

  “I did a little fact-checking,” she told him. “Remember how Pomeroy said he was guarding the basement entrance? It had to be on the Main Street side. The only other entrance was blocked with vehicles. Main Street was where Jack Ruby sneaked in. He said so himself to the Warren Commission.”

  “He sure seemed pissed that you knew so much about it,” Jonas said. “I can’t get over that.”

  “And remember what Pomeroy said about joining the police? He joked around that maybe they were recruiting from a newsletter called LIFELINE?”

  “Vaguely,” he confessed.

  “Well, that’s what he said. I remember it. I checked out this LIFELINE thing. Nobody’s sure if it was a newsletter or a radio show or both. But it’s pretty interesting. The owners of LIFELINE hated Kennedy. An oil gazillionaire named Hank Harlan and his sons ran it. Well, it just so happens that Harlan and his cronies put a huge ad in the Dallas papers on the very day of the assassination. It’s known as the ‘Welcome to Dallas’ ad to all the conspiracy kooks. It listed a bunch of issues they had with him. Real nasty. I can’t imagine anybody doing something like it today. They called him a Communist, un-American, everything in the book. It says he abandoned ‘The Monroe Doctrine’ and adopted ‘The Spirit of Moscow.’”

  “Hank Harlan?” Jonas asked. “Never heard of him.”

  “You know ‘Dallas’, the TV show, right?” she asked. “They say the main character was based on Harlan.”

  “Does this tie in to anything else we have?”

  “Sure it does. If average Joes who were involved with a known Kennedy hater are being signed up as policemen? Right there in the city where Kennedy ends up getting shot? And then two days later Oswald is murdered in the basement of the police station?”

  “Okay,” Jonas said. “So why did they hate Kennedy enough to kill him? Was it just a right versus left kind of thing?”

  “I’m sure that played into it,” Reno said. “But get this. Harlan made his millions in oil, right? Well, just a few months before he was killed, let’s say early 1963, Kennedy had just started coming after the oil companies. He took away some tax breaks and said he wasn’t done yet. One article I found said the oil industry might lose like three hundred million dollars a year if Kennedy got his way. Some kind of tax thing.”

  “Interesting, I guess. But you’re all over the place with this.”

  “Yeah. I’m still brainstorming,” she admitted. “Just think about it. And give me a call sometime, okay?”

  ~~~

  The next morning Michelle Griffin grabbed Jonas’s arm as he was on his way to Burkhardt’s office to tell him about LIFELINE. “He’s not there,” she told him. “He’s in Trappe’s office. They’re screaming at each other. It started yesterday afternoon.”

  “What’s going on?”

  “Nobody knows. But it sounds big.”

  “By the way, has anybody been poking around my desk?” Jonas asked. “All my stuff is moved around, even in my drawers.”

  “Somebody was in your drawers?” Michelle asked. “That’s bad. And God help us if your stapler is in the wrong spot.”

  Jonas found out what the yelling was about later that day when he was summoned to Burkhardt’s office. “I’m leaving,” Burkhardt said as soon as Jonas sat down. “I got an offer at a paper back home in Sacramento,” he explained. “I’ve been kicking around the idea of moving back for a while now. The timing is perfect.”

  Kind of like the timing for Pomeroy when he became a policeman, and again when he joined ERC, Jonas thought. “Sounds like it,” he said. “How long before you leave?”

  “Today’s my last day,” Burkhardt said. “That’s the thing. They offered me the job but they need me right away. Trappe’s been screaming at me for two hours but I’m not passing this up.”

  They talked for a few minutes more. When people began poking their heads into the office Jonas got up, shook Burkhardt’s hand, and walked back to his own desk. It was only after he sat down that he regretted not asking about the fate of the Kennedy story. Without a sponsor at the editor level there was no guarantee that he would have the chance to finish the story. By the time he went back to ask about it Burkhardt was gone.

  -- Chapter 8 --

  The bespectacled man in the plaid shirt looked up from the workbench in his basement when he heard the footsteps. “Max,” he said calmly when he saw who it was. “Come on in. What brin
gs you up this way? Not business, I hope. How long has it been?”

  Max, a stout man dressed in an oxford shirt and khakis, stood on the stairs in silence while his eyes adjusted to the dim lighting before carefully walking down the remaining steps.

  “It’s been a long time, Eddie,” Max said.

  “Not long enough,” Eddie answered with a smirk. “You look good,” he said after they embraced.

  “I’m not alone. Remember Bremer? He dropped in this morning. He wanted to call but I told him we ought to just take a ride over and do this in person.”

  “That doesn’t sound good.”

  “Something’s come up. I’ll let Bremer tell you all about it. He had to go back for something in the car.”

  “I was hoping we were done with this. I’m tired.”

  “We’re down here in the basement!” Max yelled up the stairs when he heard the front door close. Footsteps approached the basement door. “Down here!”

  “Can we talk here?” Bremer asked after coming down.

  “Yeah, it’s clear,” Eddie said. Whenever he and Max referred to each other by their aliases it meant there was trouble, so he braced himself. Bremer’s presence meant it was serious. “What’s up?” he asked, putting his sandpaper aside.

  “It’s Pomeroy,” Bremer said. “A couple reporters got to him. New ones. I just got a report on it this morning. This is top priority for us now. Pomeroy doesn’t take a crap anymore without us close enough to get a whiff of it. That’s straight from the top. And he’s out of chances.”

  “Damn it,” Eddie said softly. “I thought he was smarter than that. Who are the reporters? What do they know?”

  “A couple of kids,” Bremer said. “We’ve never heard of either one of them. One’s from North Carolina. Marino’s got somebody taking a closer look. I don’t know where the girl’s from yet.”

  “There aren’t supposed to be any surprises anymore,” Eddie said.