The Kennedy Connection

by R. G. Belsky

  “No, it’s a good thing. But it’s not the only thing. You don’t feel like a complete person, as someone worthy of being loved, without that star reporter label on you. That’s why I’m concerned about the impact all of this recent success will have on you. Yes, I’m happy for you as a reporter. But I’m worried about you as a person.”

  At some point, she started asking me questions about my personal life.

  “Have you tried to make contact with your ex-wife again?”

  “No, not since the time I went to her apartment that I told you about already.”

  That wasn’t completely true either. On the night my story had broken all over page one, I’d gone back to her place. After I left the bar, I just stood outside Susan’s apartment for a while. I’m not sure why. I thought about going in and showing her the paper and trying to get her to change her mind about everything again. But I didn’t. I just stayed there on the street and watched the lights in her apartment until they went out. Then I went home.

  “What about Carrie Bratten?” she asked.

  A warning bell went off in my head. Did I say something about what happened at the bar the other night? I didn’t think so. But then how else would she know? Why was she suddenly asking personal questions about me and Carrie?

  “The only reason I asked,” she said, “is that you’ve talked about her a few times in the past. Not in a flattering way. But I just wondered if that had changed at all. What’s the Bratten woman like?”

  “Young. Arrogant. Very, very ambitious. She’d do anything to get ahead as a reporter.”

  “Does that remind you of anyone?”

  I didn’t say anything.

  “Is she attractive?”

  “She’s okay.”

  “Describe her.”

  I did.

  “That sounds attractive,” Landis said when I was finished. “But you’re not interested in her? Sexually, that is?”

  “Like I told you, I haven’t had sex in a long time. I’m pretty horny. A lot of women attract me sexually these days. But Carrie would not be at the top of my list. Too much trouble. Definitely high-maintenance. And working together like we do . . . well, it just wouldn’t be worth the trouble.”

  “Does she feel the same way about you?”

  The image of her that night outside the bar—holding on to me, her lips close to mine, her eyes filled with passion—crossed my mind.

  “I can’t imagine that she’d have any interest in me,” I said.

  “I’m glad to hear that,” Landis said. “Because I did wonder if all this success the two of you are having as a team on this story might somehow draw you closer together, closer in many ways, one of them possibly even sexually. I must tell you, I think that would be a very bad thing to happen. You do need to find someone to share your life with again. But I think it should be someone without any connection to your job. For the reasons we discussed earlier. Your life needs to be about more than your job. And so I would advise strongly against you beginning any kind of a personal relationship with anyone at the News, especially the Bratten woman.”

  “I’m with you there, Doc,” I said. “Don’t worry, the one thing I’m not going to do is sleep with Carrie Bratten.”

  Toward the end of the session she brought up something I wasn’t expecting.

  “What happened with the Victor Reyes story?” she asked.

  “I stopped doing it.”

  “Why?”

  “Because the other story—this big opportunity—came along.”

  “You were very enthusiastic about the Reyes story when you first came here. You talked about how if you could do this one story right again, you’d feel better about yourself. Not just as a reporter, but as a person. I was very impressed by that.”

  “I didn’t know what else to do then,” I said. “I was desperate. But then I got lucky. I got the JFK story dropped into my lap. That’s the thing about being a reporter. Being good has a lot to do with the job. But sometimes you just have to be lucky. So much of it is luck. Being in the right place at the right time. That’s what happened to me.”

  As she was walking me to the door at the end of the session, Landis started talking about our next appointment.

  “How about next Tuesday?” she asked. “Same time? Four p.m.?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Tuesday at four doesn’t work for you?”

  “I don’t think I’m coming back. I’m done with this little charade we’ve been doing here. I came here before because the Daily News made me after the panic attacks. I told you, I’m not having the panic attacks anymore. And the Daily News . . . well, they can’t make me see you. All they care about is that I keep busting exclusives on this story. They don’t care about this doctor bullshit anymore either. And, even if they did, I don’t have to listen to them now. I’m a reporter again, not a patient. A real reporter. That’s what it’s all about for me, Doc. As long as I can do that, all the rest of it will take care of itself. That means I don’t need you.”

  I thought she’d be surprised. But she didn’t seem to be. Almost like she was expecting it.

  “I don’t suppose there’s anything I can say that would change your mind.”

  “Not a thing.”

  She looked at me sadly.

  “Look, I’m cured,” I told her. “That’s what I’m going to tell my editors at the News. And that’s what you should tell them too. You did your job. The sessions were a big success. I’m cured.”

  I pushed open the door and started out of the office.

  I looked around at her.

  She was still standing there looking at me with that sad expression on her face.

  “I’m sorry, Doc,” I told her.

  “So am I,” she said.

  Chapter 29

  ERIC MATHIS was the key to this.

  His life had been turned upside down when he found out about his family background and the connection with Lee Harvey Oswald. Then all the hullaballoo about the fiftieth anniversary of JFK’s death must have upset him even more. He devoted his life to the assassination, finding some sort of comfort or whatever in being around the events of that day in Dallas. But then, when he read the book his father was writing, which would make this all public, he couldn’t handle it anymore. Maybe there was something specific in the book that set him off. Maybe it was just the thought of his story becoming public and him being forever branded to the world as Lee Harvey Oswald’s grandson that he couldn’t handle. For whatever reason, he embarked on this violent rampage that he somehow linked to the JFK assassination.

  Sitting at my desk in the newsroom, I took out the documents and other materials I’d grabbed from Eric Mathis’s place in Dallas and read through as much of it as I could.

  Most of the materials dealt with Lee Harvey Oswald’s time in New Orleans the summer before the assassination, the same time period when Oswald had supposedly gotten Emily Springer pregnant with Eric’s father.

  There was much speculation in the material—some of it presumably substantiated, a lot of it not—about Oswald’s relationship with both the mob and U.S. intelligence groups in New Orleans.

  Much of it seemed to focus on a mob boss named Carlos Marcello, who had run the New Orleans crime family back then. Of all the conspiracy theories floating around about the killing of John F. Kennedy, the ones that always made the most sense to many people involved Marcello as the man who ordered the assassination. Marcello had been one of the primary targets of both President Kennedy and his brother Bobby as attorney general in their attempts to go after organized crime.

  There was evidence too that Oswald had had a relationship with David Ferrie, a colorful New Orleans pilot and right-wing activist who had dealings with Marcello at times. Ferrie and Oswald had belonged to the same youth group when they were both growing up together in New Orleans. An
d Ferrie—who had been played as a wacky but lovable character by Joe Pesci in the movie JFK—had aroused suspicion because he suddenly drove from New Orleans to Dallas on the night before the assassination.

  Mathis also seemed to dwell a lot on the presence of Oswald in the Camp Street area of New Orleans and the potential significance of him being in the heart of all the ultraconservative political groups based there. Mathis specifically had collected a lot of articles about a right-wing ex–FBI agent named Guy Banister, who operated a private detective agency out of 544 Camp Street. Many people who thought Oswald was secretly working for the CIA, posing as a left-wing activist, also speculated that Banister—with his deep U.S. intelligence connections—might have been Oswald’s “handler” during the early ’60s.

  Then there was the shooting of Oswald himself. Mathis had accumulated all sorts of materials—again much of it based on speculation or rumor or innuendo—that Jack Ruby had had connections with both the mob and Oswald. The angle Mathis was pursuing on Ruby seemed clear: Someone didn’t want Oswald to tell what he knew about the assassination and a conspiracy behind it; they wanted Oswald to take the sole blame for it instead. So they got Jack Ruby to kill him.

  There was only one problem with all of this.

  Jack Ruby was dead. So were Carlos Marcello, David Ferrie, and Guy Banister.

  There was no one alive to go after to confirm any of it, no clear-cut trail to follow for anyone to pursue the scenario that Oswald was not the lone assassin, that he was the “patsy” who got caught up in it and wound up taking the fall instead of the men really responsible for killing the president.

  I could see that now.

  And, more important, Lee Mathis must have seen the futility of it too.

  So what did Eric Mathis do next?

  “Have you heard from your son?” I asked Lee Mathis.

  “No.”

  “Are you sure about that?”

  “Of course, I’m sure.”

  “Would you tell me if he did call you?”

  “Yes.”

  I stared at him without saying anything.

  “Okay, I wouldn’t tell you,” he said.

  I kept staring.

  “Maybe I would, maybe I wouldn’t. I’m not sure.”

  “Well, that pretty much covers all the possibilities,” I said.

  “But he hasn’t tried to contact me. That’s the truth. I wish he would, I’m so concerned about him. The last contact I had with him was several weeks ago, when I tried to reach him on the phone and he refused to talk to me.”

  Mathis himself didn’t look good. He seemed much weaker and more frail than the previous time I was there. It wasn’t just his physical appearance. His voice sounded weak, and there was none of the emotion and excitement about the book he’d had when he talked to me about it before.

  “One thing’s for sure,” I told him. “The publicity for all this is going to make everyone want to read your book. I know you wish it didn’t have to happen this way, but at least people will read your book and listen to what you have to say. That should give you some solace.”

  “No, it doesn’t give me any satisfaction at all,” he said. “I wanted to do the book, but now I’ve lost my son because of it. That’s not a very good trade, is it? I should have left well enough alone. I shouldn’t have messed with the past. I started these things, set all of this in motion. I wish I hadn’t done that. But it’s too late now to undo the damage I’ve done.”

  “Well, it should make your agent happy anyway,” I told him, mostly because I couldn’t think of anything else to say. “Nikki Reynolds is probably ecstatic about all this publicity. She always says there’s no bad publicity for a book, that any publicity is good.”

  “Nikki Reynolds isn’t my agent anymore,” he said.

  “When did this happen?”

  “A few days ago.”

  “Just about the same time the news broke about Eric and the connection to the murders here?”

  “Yes.”

  “So you fired her?”

  “Actually, she fired me.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “She said she didn’t want to represent me or this book.”

  “Why not?”

  “She wouldn’t say. She just said she didn’t want to be my agent and then hung up. I called back, but she wouldn’t take the call. Or any other calls I’ve made to her. I don’t understand why.”

  Neither did I. That didn’t make any sense at all. Nikki had been willing to try to sell the book when no one else knew him or had any reason to believe any of it at all. Now everyone knew about him and the book and was following the news about Lee Harvey Oswald’s secret son and grandson. So Nikki should have wanted to represent the book more than ever. Instead, she walked away from a likely best seller. Hell, it sounded like she ran away from it. Why? I made a note to call her to ask what was behind her sudden change of heart.

  I tried to ask him some more questions about his son and about his revelations about Lee Harvey Oswald and about how he thought the JFK assassination could possibly be connected to what was going on here now. But he was fading fast. He told me he was tired and didn’t feel up to talking anymore.

  “Read the book,” he said to me just before I finally gave up and left his apartment. “Everything I know is there. It’s all in that damn book.”

  Chapter 30

  IT WAS CLOSE to the end of the day by the time I got back to the Daily News. The Oswald manuscript was in a drawer of my desk. My plan was to take it home with me that night and read it all again from cover to cover, to look for any angles or leads I might have missed.

  The phone on my desk was ringing when I got there. I picked it up.

  “Mr. Malloy, this is Camille Reyes,” the voice on the other end said.

  For just a second, I had trouble placing the name. It had been a long time and a lot of things had changed for me since that day I’d sat in her living room in the Bronx and talked to her about her son.

  “How are you?” I said finally.

  “Did I call at a bad time?”

  “No, this is fine.”

  “I just wondered . . . well, I never heard back from you . . . so I wanted to ask if you’d found out anything more about who shot my son?”

  There it was again. The moment of truth. It happens to every reporter. No matter how many stories you break, no matter how many exclusives you’re responsible for, there’s always the guilt about the stories you never did. I’d felt the first pangs of that guilt in Dr. Landis’s office when she brought up Victor Reyes. Now here it was all over again, but this time like a slap in the face from Reyes’s mother asking me what I’d done about the promises I’d made back then. Well, I hadn’t done much.

  “I really haven’t been able to find out anything about your son’s shooting,” I told her.

  “I was afraid of that.”

  “I did make some checks, did some interviews . . .”

  “But no one knew anything?”

  “It’s been a long time, Mrs. Reyes.”

  “I understand.”

  There was a silence on the other end of the phone that probably lasted only a few seconds, but it seemed to me to go on forever.

  “I’ll make some more calls when I can,” I said. “I’ll try to do some more digging. I promise to get back to you if I find out anything at all about your son.”

  “Thank you very much, Mr. Malloy. I appreciate your effort,” she said, even though—and maybe this was just my imagination—she probably had a feeling she would never hear from me again.

  I tried to put Camille Reyes out of my mind. But the guilt was still eating away at me. At some point, I reached into a drawer and took out the file I’d put together on the Reyes case that I’d walked away from once I started doing the Kennedy story.

  I p
aged through it again, refreshing myself on what I had done and what I hadn’t done about Victor Reyes. The one obvious missing piece was still Bobby Ortiz, whom the police had identified as the prime suspect in the shooting fifteen years ago. I remembered that Brad Lawton, then one of the investigating detectives and now a deputy police commissioner, had told me he’d try to check on whatever happened to Ortiz. I still had his card with a direct office line on it. I dialed that now, figuring it was unlikely he’d pick up the phone this late. But he did.

  “I wish I could help you,” Lawton said after I told him what I wanted. “But I did do a check on Ortiz. He disappeared afterward, got arrested on a DUI charge in Poughkeepsie a few months later—but the cops there let him go on bail before they knew he was wanted for questioning as a suspect in a shooting. No sign of him since then. Best theory is he’s dead. Killed in some kind of gang violence. Not a long life span for guys like Bobby Ortiz in the Bronx.”

  I’d figured as much, but I was still disappointed. If Ortiz had been the one who shot Reyes, and he was dead now, that was probably my last chance to find out what happened that night. Christ, fifteen years was a long time to go back on a case like this. I should have realized that at the beginning before I made promises to Camille Reyes and to Santiago’s widow too. Promises that were impossible to keep.

  “From what I see, it looks like you’ve got plenty on your plate already,” Lawton said. “I’ve been following your coverage of the Kennedy killings. You’ve really been leading the way on that.”

  “Are you involved in that investigation at all?” I asked Lawton.

  “Nah, that’s being handled directly out of Commissioner Piersall’s office. He’s personally spearheading the search for the Mathis kid.”

  “If you do hear anything about the whereabouts of Mathis—or even more information on the search for him—I’d appreciate it if you could give me a heads-up call.”

  “No problem,” Lawton said, then added with a laugh before hanging up, “But it sounds like you know more about this case than I do. It’s a helluva story. To be honest, I don’t understand why you’d even care about Ortiz or Reyes at this point. Kinda pales next to the hunt for Eric Mathis, huh?”