by R. G. Belsky
“It’s my job.”
“It’s more than a job to you.”
“Okay, I take my job very seriously.”
“Which makes it even more terrifying for you when something happens that threatens to take that job away from you. Like the Houston story did.”
I didn’t say anything. I didn’t want to talk to this woman anymore. I sure as hell didn’t want to talk about Houston with her.
“Let’s talk about 9/11,” Landis said. “You’ve made numerous references to that since you’ve been coming to see me. Why is that?”
“Because I was there.”
“So you witnessed a good deal of death and destruction?”
“Well, almost three thousand people died. And hundreds of tons of steel and concrete—where people worked, shopped, and visited—were vaporized into dust. So yes, I would say there was a great deal of death and destruction there. You’ve heard of 9/11, right? It was in all the papers.”
She ignored the sarcasm.
“Did you know any of the victims?” she asked.
“I knew some of them. A few cops and firemen I’d worked with over the years. A woman who worked for the Port Authority who was attending a breakfast at Windows on the World that morning. The husband of a neighbor of mine who’d just stopped in there on his way to work uptown to drop something off in one of the offices.”
“And the other victims—the ones you didn’t know—I assume you got to know a lot about them as you reported on the story during the weeks afterward?”
“I interviewed hundreds of families and friends and coworkers of the dead,” I said. “I wrote their stories, I cried with them, I comforted them, and I raged with them against the cold-blooded terrorists who had carried out this horrendous act that took away so many good people and changed the lives of so many still living so irrevocably.”
“How did all this tragedy affect you?”
“I’m not sure how to answer that.”
“Were you ever overwhelmed with grief? Broke down in tears or had an emotional collapse? Felt like you couldn’t go on anymore? Decided that you couldn’t handle any more of the death and destruction and heartbreak that you were covering every day? That it was tearing you up too much inside to keep doing this? Did anything like that ever happen to you, Mr. Malloy?”
I snorted contemptuously.
“Boy, you just don’t get it, do you? Being a reporter is my job. If a reporter lets his emotions take over, then he’s no longer effective. You don’t know anything about me or my job. And yet you sit there, all prim and proper with your degree on the wall, and take notes about me and tell me what you think I should be doing. Well, let me tell you something, lady . . . you don’t have a clue to what being a reporter is all about. I shut all of that emotion out when I’m doing my job. It’s the only way I can do my job. Sure, I could have broken down in tears that first day when the Twin Towers collapsed and I first saw and grasped the unimaginable horror that was happening in front of me. But I didn’t. I did my job. I did it for a long time after that and I did it well. That’s called being a reporter. And that’s what I am. But I guess someone like you could never understand that.”
I was angry, but it felt good. Felt good to let the anger out.
“I do understand,” Landis said calmly. “I understand perfectly. And I think you’ve just done a very good job of making the point that I was trying to make to you. You use your job, you use being a reporter, as a defense mechanism. No matter how noble you try to make it—and it is a noble profession—being a reporter allows you to shut out emotion and avoid dealing with what’s really inside you. So when this shield, this defense mechanism, is taken away from you, you are forced to confront things you never did before. I believe that’s what happened to you after the Houston story fell apart. I believe the panic attacks came about because you couldn’t handle the idea that you weren’t a reporter anymore. And so you were forced to confront and to deal with all these emotions in your life for the first time without the shield of being a reporter you embraced for so long to protect you. When you couldn’t do that, your body reacted by shutting down. Hence, the panic attacks. I believe it was the loss of your identity as a reporter—the thing you identified yourself by—that brought on the onset of the panic attacks.” She shrugged. “Anyway, that’s my working theory at the moment.”
I stared at her. Desperately trying to hold myself together, even though this woman had just taken me and my life apart like I was a specimen in a medical lab.
“Is that the kind of stuff they teach you in psychiatry school?” I said.
“It doesn’t make sense to you?”
I sighed. “Yes, it makes sense. Sort of . . . I guess.”
“We need to get past you as a reporter,” she said. “We need to find out about you as a person. This might be difficult for you. It might be upsetting at times. All I’m asking is that you try, Mr. Malloy. Will you do that for me?”
“I guess,” I shrugged.
What the hell choice did I have?
“If you do, I think you’ll help yourself get answers for some of the other things in your life you’ve talked about in here. The failure of your marriage. Loss of your friends. Difficulty getting along with people at work . . .”
“Hey, maybe it’ll even bring my wife back, huh? You could add marriage consultant—hell, marriage fixer—to your headshrinker degree.”
“Let’s talk about your marriage. You said before that your wife left you in the aftermath of the Houston scandal. That the whole Houston thing not only cost you your job, but your wife and marriage too.”
“Yes, she just couldn’t handle the toll it took on me.”
“That’s kind of a convenient answer.”
“What do you mean?”
“What was your life like before Houston? Was your marriage perfect? Did you and your wife ever fight? Were you madly in love all that time? And then, the minute you began having troubles as a reporter over the Houston scandal, it simply disassembled your marriage overnight? Is that what happened?”
Damn. This woman was good. She asked questions as relentlessly as I did as a reporter.
“No marriage is perfect,” I told her. “There always are problems.”
“How about your friends?” she asked. “Were they real friends? Or just people who liked being around you because you were a star reporter?”
I thought about Nikki Reynolds. The way she’d been my pal, my agent, and even my lover when I was riding high. How quickly she dropped me when it all went bad. Then came out of nowhere to be my friend again when she needed me to do something for her.
“I guess I had a lot of fake friends,” I said.
“So it wasn’t the Houston scandal that cost you your friends. They were never truly your friends. If it hadn’t been the Houston scandal, it would have been something else for them probably. What do you think about that, Mr. Malloy?”
“I guess I need some better friends, huh?”
“You’ve got to stop blaming Houston for everything that’s gone wrong in your life,” Landis said.
Chapter 15
IF I THOUGHT there was going to be a quick and simple ending to this story—that an exclusive would drop right in my lap—that hope ended as soon as I saw Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.
Oswald was barely fifty, based on the information I knew about him, but he looked at least a decade older. He sat in a wheelchair, a thin, frail-looking man with an oxygen tube in his nose and a table stacked with bottles of pills and other medical paraphernalia next to him.
On the subway ride up there, it had all seemed so easy.
I’d imagined a scenario like this:
The previously unknown son of Lee Harvey Oswald spent his entire life frustrated by some sort of injustice that history had dealt to his father. Maybe he thought his father really was a patsy of some more s
inister force, who had been set up as the fall guy for a conspiracy carried out by many. Maybe he thought his father was innocent altogether, just the wrong man in the wrong place at the wrong time. Whatever the reason, he set out to seek revenge for his father with a bizarre vendetta of murder and violence sparked by the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy’s death—and his father’s too. Except one intrepid reporter (that would be me) figured it all out, broke the story, and became a media star all over again. It was a nice dream. But that’s all it was.
Looking at Oswald now, it was hard to imagine that he had somehow made his way down to the Bowery and stabbed Harold Daniels to death.
It was even harder to believe he could have followed Shawn Kennedy into Union Square Park from the bar nearby and shot her to death.
“I have diabetes and emphysema,” Oswald explained to me. “Some other things are wrong with me too, but those are the two biggest problems I’m dealing with now. I’ve already lost one leg to the diabetes, and the situation on the other one isn’t looking good. That’s where I was when you left your messages. At the hospital. The emphysema is the worst thing. That’s what keeps me hooked up to this damn oxygen machine. Without it, I have real trouble breathing. The doctors give me six months, maybe a year tops to live.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
It didn’t seem enough. I felt like there was something more I should say, but I couldn’t think of any words to fit the enormity of this man’s situation.
“I’m really sorry,” I repeated.
Oswald shrugged.
“They say stuff like this is all in your genes. A lot of it is predetermined before you even get into the world. I guess my parents didn’t give me very good genes. Of course, my biological mother died when I was a baby. And my biological father. . . . well, you know what happened to him. Lee Harvey Oswald. He was twenty-four years old when he died. Can you believe that? Anyway, I can’t find out much about my biological family’s medical history because . . . well, because neither parent lived long enough to have much of a history.”
I had decided not to ask him about the Kennedy murders for now, because I didn’t want to spook him. I figured I’d just let him tell me about himself and his book and see where it all led.
He seemed happy to do that.
Without much prodding, he talked easily and openly about his life and the book and how he had discovered the facts about his past.
“I didn’t know Oswald was my biological father for a long time. I knew I was adopted. My parents had told me that when I was growing up. But my mother didn’t tell me who my biological father was until she got sick, right before she died. My father—the man who raised me—had died several years earlier. I was their only child, all that was left of the family. So I guess she wanted to make things right. To have some sort of closure or something. She told me the details of the adoption for the first time, that I was Lee Harvey Oswald’s son. I know she was doing it because she thought it was the right thing to do, but in retrospect it was probably the worst thing that ever happened in my life.
“I had lived a relatively normal life until that point, I suppose. I was married with two children, a son and a daughter. I had a pretty good job as a salesman for an advertising agency in New Orleans, where I had grown up and spent most of my life. I never had any clue that I was different from any other American guy with a job and a family. But everything changed for me then. The realization that I was the offspring of Lee Harvey Oswald—this horrible man who had killed our president and changed history, or so I had been told—was difficult to accept. I would lie awake at night thinking about it. Wondering if whatever madness had driven him to do what he did was inside me somewhere too.
“I never told anyone, not even my wife and my children, not then, anyway. I kept the horrible truth inside me. I began to drink heavily, I couldn’t concentrate on my job, I couldn’t be there for my family. Finally, at some point, it all fell apart. My wife left me, my kids didn’t want to talk to me, and I lost my job. For a while, I drifted like that. Going from sales job to sales job, drinking a lot and mostly feeling sorry for myself and who I was. It was a terrible burden to have to live with. I was Lee Harvey Oswald’s son. My God, how could someone live with something like that?”
He told me that his name had been Lee Mathis. His adoptive parents had kept the first name his biological mother had given him—naming him after her secret love—but his last name had been the same as theirs for most of his life.
But then, when his health began to fade and he realized his own mortality, he decided to confront the demons he’d been avoiding. Rather than run away from the father he had never known, he decided to embrace his family heritage. Changed his name from Lee Mathis to Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. Proclaimed it to the world. Finally, about a year ago, he told his family the truth too. He wanted them to understand what he had been going through when he had drifted apart from them.
“How’d that go?” I asked.
“Not well.”
“They didn’t believe you?”
“Not at first. They told me that the alcohol had gone to my brain and ruined it. That I was crazy. That I needed some kind of psychiatric help. But then I showed them this.”
He reached over to the table next to him, took a sheet of paper out of a file folder, and handed it to me.
“My birth certificate,” he said. “I went back to New Orleans and dug through all the records for April 21, 1964, the day I was born.”
I read the birth certificate. The name on it was indeed Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. The mother was Emily Springer. The father was listed as Lee Harvey Oswald (deceased).
“It could be someone else named Lee Harvey Oswald,” I said.
“How many people named Lee Harvey Oswald do you think there are?”
“I don’t know.”
“I spoke to a relative of my birth mother—her sister, Laura—who said my mother was dating the same Lee Harvey Oswald who worked at the Texas School Book Depository in Dallas. The sister met him too.”
I handed the document back to him.
“What about DNA proof?” I asked.
“A little hard, since my father’s been in the ground for nearly half a century.”
“Wasn’t there some talk of digging him up for some kind of DNA testing a few years back?”
He nodded. “There were claims that it wasn’t really his body in the ground. So they compared the DNA to make sure. It was him.”
“So theoretically you could compare your DNA to that sample?”
“Theoretically.”
“And practically?”
“I’ve never been allowed access to the DNA samples. All of that stuff is locked up tight. The FBI and CIA won’t release it to allow for that kind of testing.”
“But you would take a DNA test if you could?”
“Absolutely.”
He told me next that he had decided to write the book to find out the truth about his father as part of his own desire to learn the secrets of who he really was.
“I didn’t start out doing it to prove my father was innocent,” he said to me now. “I just wanted to discover who he was and why he had done what he did. But the more I learned, the more I realized that a terrible injustice had been done to my father. I was never a conspiracy theorist. All my life I had just accepted the official ‘lone gunman’ version of the story. But there was a conspiracy. And my father was one of the victims. He was a victim, just like John F. Kennedy was a victim that day. That’s what my book is all about.”
He said he had moved to New York several months ago to work on the book. He felt it was important to be near the New York literary market to sell the manuscript. He knew he didn’t have much time left to work on it—or sell it. He’d sent the rough draft of the manuscript out to a number of publishers and agents. One of them was Nikki Reynolds. He also sent copies of the near
ly finished manuscript to his family a few weeks ago—his wife, son, and daughter. He said he wanted them to read it in case he died before getting it published.
Before I left, he handed me a copy of the manuscript. It was very thick, more than five hundred pages. He said I was welcome to take it and read it later, if it would help me write my article about the book for the Daily News. He also said I could quote any passages from it for the article.
It was time to get to the real reason for my visit.
“Mr. Oswald . . .”
“Lee.”
“Lee, there’ve been two murders recently with some sort of link to John F. Kennedy and the assassination. A woman in Union Square Park and a man on the Bowery. Both victims had Kennedy half-dollars near their bodies. In addition, I received a letter at the paper from someone claiming to have committed the murders and threatening to blow up Kennedy Airport and do more violence as some sort of way to remember the JFK assassination.”
He looked confused. “What does this have to do with my book?”
“I was hoping you could tell me that. It just seems like an awfully big coincidence that these Kennedy-related killings happened at the same time as your book,” I said.
“My God, you can’t believe I could have had anything to do with these murders.”
I looked at him sitting there in his wheelchair, hooked up to the oxygen tube. Looking like he was barely able to move around his own apartment.
“No, I guess not.”
“You have to believe me!”
The truth was I did believe him.
I was hoping Lee Harvey Oswald Jr. might have some answers to help me make sense out of it all.
