“I know, and you deserve them.” Smith looked to his left as the eagle Cole had disturbed yesterday screeched from across Big Lake. “I’m going to tell you a story. I probably shouldn’t, but I will.” He shook his head. “Bastards,” he muttered.
“Come on,” Cole urged.
Smith rubbed his mouth with the back of his hand. “Your father and I were Dallas police officers and roommates in 1963. We were twenty years old and had only been on the force about a year at the time. On November twenty-second we went to Dealey Plaza to see the president on his way from Love Field to his Trade Mart luncheon. We had both worked late the night before, until around four in the morning, I believe. We were tired, but we wanted to see Kennedy. Christ, everyone did.
“We parked in the lot behind the grassy knoll well before the motorcade was to pass by, then walked up the railroad tracks to the triple underpass and stood on top of the bridge, on the west side of the plaza. That vantage point provided a perfect view.” Smith swallowed hard, as if this was bringing back unpleasant memories. “The motorcade came up Main Street, turned right onto Houston, then left on Elm in front of the Depository. The limousine was just beginning to accelerate after making the sharp turn onto Elm when everything went nuts.” Smith cleared his throat. “Your father and I heard the first shot very distinctly, but from our position there wasn’t any way to pinpoint where it had come from. There were buildings all around the plaza and the echo was tremendous.” A faraway expression came to Smith’s face. “I still remember your father yelling, ‘Did you hear that?’ I answered affirmatively. I also remember that we didn’t look at each other while we were talking. We were too busy searching the plaza for gunmen. Our training kicked in automatically.”
“What happened after that?” Cole was riveted to Smith’s words, visually aware of nothing but the man’s face.
“The second shot came, louder than the first.”
“The magic bullet,” Cole prompted.
“I think of it as the pristine bullet,” Smith said.
“After supposedly being fired from the Depository’s sixth floor, traveling through Kennedy, smashing Governor Connally’s rib and his wrist, then lodging in his thigh, the bullet they found on Connally’s stretcher at Parkland Hospital looked as if it had never been fired. It had lost less than three percent of its original weight, less than three grains. I’ve fired a lot of bullets from a lot of different guns in my time, and I can tell you that doesn’t happen, not after smashing through two bones, anyway. That bullet should have looked like a piece of chewed gum.” Smith paused.
“Go on,” Cole urged.
“Mmm.” Smith rubbed his chin again. “Well, then the killing shot came. It tore the top of President Kennedy’s head right off, at least that’s what it looked like from where we were. It was really more to the side, but it was awful, regardless.”
Cole felt his stomach churn. The Dealey Tape had graphically illustrated how awful that moment was. “And then?”
“Your father and I decided immediately to assist. We weren’t on duty, so we were dressed in street clothes. We realized that not being in uniform could create a problem because the in-uniform people wouldn’t recognize us as law officers, but we didn’t care. We had to help. It was instinct.
“Your father ran south on the tracks, then down onto Commerce Street and into the plaza. I went north back toward the train yard. As I got to the other side of the bridge, I saw a man running away from the fence behind the grassy knoll. He was carrying what looked like a tool box. I chased him, but I couldn’t catch him. He had too much of a lead.” Smith shook his head. “I guess I was that damn close to making history.”
“Me too,” Cole murmured, remembering the man with the scar smiling smugly as he snatched the Dealey Tape. “Then my father must have taken the film away from someone as he ran across Dealey Plaza.”
Smith nodded. “Not just someone, son, he took it away from your mother.” Smith saw shock register on Cole’s face. “A young woman named Andrea Sage.”
Here was the answer to another of those long-unanswered questions. Cole’s aunt and uncle had claimed all these years not to know his mother’s name or anything about her except that, according to his father, she had died when Cole was a year old. They said they had never met her, and explained that his father had fallen out of touch with everyone in the family after a secret wedding to a mysterious woman. Then he had brought one-year-old Cole to live with them, and disappeared again.
“So my mother’s maiden name was Sage,” Cole said quietly.
“Yes,” Smith confirmed. “That’s why I asked you to identify yourself with your middle name on the phone. Your middle name was her maiden name. Your father said he never told anyone that except me. I wanted to make certain the person who picked up the phone on the trading floor was the person I was looking for. I couldn’t take a chance that the wrong person got hold of that envelope. I waited in the reception area until I saw that you had it.”
So his aunt and uncle hadn’t been lying all these years. They really hadn’t known anything about his parents. He had always suspected that they might be withholding information because his parents were criminals and his aunt and uncle didn’t want him to know the truth.
“Why wasn’t Andrea Sage up with the two of you on the railroad overpass?”
“She wasn’t Jim’s wife at that point. In fact, he had no idea who she was. They met for the first time in Dealey Plaza seconds after President Kennedy was shot, though they didn’t really have much of a chance to introduce themselves properly.” Smith smiled. “God, it really all fits together now.”
“What fits together?” Cole asked impatiently.
Smith pried a splinter from the tabletop, inspected it briefly, then flicked it away. “One morning a few days after the killing a very pretty young woman walked into the Dallas police headquarters and announced that she had recorded the Kennedy assassination on a Bell & Howell spring-wound movie camera. Andrea Sage was that pretty young woman, and she said she was certain the film could shed light on what had happened, except for one small problem. Someone had forcibly ripped the movie camera away from her only moments after the shooting. Then she dropped the real bombshell. The person who had confiscated the camera and the film was a Dallas policeman. An officer named Jim Egan.”
“What?” That made no sense to Cole. “She wouldn’t have known he was a cop. You said my father wasn’t in uniform that day.”
“That’s right, I did.”
“Did he identify himself when he took the film away from her?”
“No, he didn’t. Andrea identified him later on her own. She watched Jack Ruby shoot Lee Harvey Oswald on television and saw your father in the background. He was in uniform when they were bringing Oswald out. Andrea recognized his face after she had seen the killing replayed a few times on television. She said she waited after recognizing him before she came forward because she was certain he must have passed the film on to the proper people. However, when nothing came out about the film in the press, she decided to follow up.”
“But in all the books and accounts of that day you never hear about this,” Cole pointed out. “I mean, there’s the airman on leave from Alaska who claimed to have a camera confiscated and—”
“And several others,” Smith interrupted. “I know. But this story remained under wraps, primarily because no one believed Andrea, not even the few reporters who heard about it. Your father adamantly denied her accusation about taking the camera, and she was acting mysterious. She gave her permanent address as a Dallas hotel, and she wasn’t willing to produce any identification proving who she was. It was a simple case of believing a man who had a good, though brief, reputation as a law officer over a woman who seemed to be trying to generate her fifteen minutes of fame.”
“But she wasn’t lying,” Cole said defiantly.
Smith pressed his tongue in the gap b
etween his teeth again, then smacked his lips. “Apparently not.” A strange expression came over his face. “But how did you know your father confiscated the film from someone? He could have gotten it any number of ways.”
Cole was hesitant to reveal too much. But Bennett Smith was providing answers to questions he had wondered about for many years and he didn’t want the information flow to stop. “At the end of the Dealey Tape—”
“That’s what you call it?” Smith interrupted again.
Cole nodded.
“Incredible.” Smith shook his head, reached across the table and slapped Cole on the shoulder.
Cole grinned. “What?”
“Your father was always naming things too. He named his gun, his badge, his boots. It didn’t matter what it was. He named everything.” Smith sat back down on the bench seat still chuckling. “Go ahead, I interrupted you. I apologize.”
Suddenly Cole liked Bennett Smith even though the man was a self-described professional assassin—a claim Cole did not doubt for a moment. While he took actions many would not approve of, the man gave the impression he could convince anyone that honorable men had to commit unsavory acts to ensure the security of a republic. Smith indeed had killed the woman on Thirty-ninth Street in cold blood, but she had been about to pull a trigger herself. Smith had saved his life and that was reason enough to like him.
“It’s okay,” Cole said. “At the end of the Dealey Tape, after the limousine takes off and my mother—” Cole swallowed the words. “My mother.” It sounded strange now that he was beginning to get to know her, even if she was dead and the familiarity was coming through a conduit. “Sorry.” He glanced at Smith.
“It’s all right.” Smith wasn’t a sentimental man, but he could understand what Cole was going through.
Cole coughed, then continued. “As I was saying, the tape goes black for a second, then my father’s face appears. It’s fuzzy, but it’s obviously him. Then the tape goes black again. I guess his face appears because he’s about to take the camera from my mother.”
Smith whistled through his missing tooth. “Jim really had the tape all these years. You know, that was another one of his traits. He could keep information to himself and tell no one, not even his best friend.” Smith performed his reconnaissance once more, then looked back at Cole. “But you said what was in the safe-deposit box was a tape, not a film.”
“Yes. I played it on a VCR at Gilchrist right after I picked it up from the Chase branch.”
“Then at some point your father must have made a copy, film to tape, and probably enhanced it in the process.”
“He must have,” Cole agreed.
Smith’s eyes narrowed. “That means the original film could still be out there.”
“I guess.” Cole wasn’t interested in a film he had zero likelihood of recovering, and he didn’t want Smith distracted from the revelations he was yielding. “What happened to my mother after that?”
Smith seemed to be still pondering the fate of the original film.
“Hey.” Cole banged the table with his hand.
“Huh? Oh, sorry.” Smith rubbed his eyes for a moment. “It was the strangest thing. She went to a few reporters to try to stir up interest in her story, but they had already written her off as a fraud, as someone trying to cash in on what had happened. She kind of faded from the picture pretty quickly. And initially your father claimed to hate her. He said she was a rumormonger and a liar. I actually believed him, and why wouldn’t I?” Smith laughed. “Then about two weeks later I found out that Jim and Andrea were dating. A week after that they were married. The first I knew was when he left our apartment and explained that he was moving in with Andrea. I thought I was going to have to pay the rent myself, but even though he moved out, he kept paying it. Of course, that was your father. If he made a deal, he kept his side of the bargain no matter what. He always said that all you really had in life was your reputation. And he was right.”
“My father married Andrea Sage even after she had gone to the police and said he had taken the film from her?” Cole asked.
“Yes.”
“That’s bizarre.”
“It is, and it gets even stranger.”
“How?”
“I really shouldn’t tell you this.”
“Come on,” Cole urged.
Still Smith hesitated.
“Please, Bennett.” It was the first time Cole had addressed Smith by his first name. “I need to know.”
“I know you do,” he said, glancing toward the Lassiter. The sun was well above the horizon and its bright rays were setting the river’s surface ablaze. “What say we get going? I’d appreciate the chance to paddle downstream with you. We can keep talking on the river.”
Cole nodded slowly. “Okay.”
* * *
—
The Colombian boy was only twelve years old. He was thin, with a thick mop of straight blue-black hair, and wore nothing but a filthy pair of ragged shorts and muddy Nike basketball shoes. But his skin was a deep brown, so the strong tropical sun didn’t burn his chest or back.
Commander Magee broke into a slow trot as the boy darted ahead of him on the narrow jungle path. They had been hiking for more than two hours and Magee was beginning to wonder if the thirty dollars he had pressed into the boy’s grimy palm were going to bear fruit. “How much farther?” Magee yelled in Spanish to his young guide. Magee was fluent in Spanish, French, German and Russian.
“No too long way to there,” the boy replied in broken English. He smiled back at the gringo. It was the first time he had used the man’s native tongue.
A short time later they reached a clearing next to a muddy river. As they neared the water’s edge, Magee saw a large crocodile slither along the opposite bank where it had been sunning itself and plunge into the river with a loud splash. For several minutes Magee took in the sight, memorizing every detail about it. This was where the gun battle was supposed to have taken place.
Finally he turned to the boy. “You said there was a grave.”
“Yes.” The boy gestured downriver and took off again.
Magee followed, lugging the shovel on his shoulder. A few minutes later he hustled around a bend and found the boy squatting down, pointing at a mound of dirt in the shadow of a crude cross made of tree limbs. “Move back!” he ordered, dropping the shovel. The boy obeyed as Magee knelt down and touched the bare earth.
“You happy?” the boy asked. “Maybe give me more dollars?”
Magee looked up. “Maybe.” His eyes narrowed. “The man who made this hole and buried the body, what did he look like?”
“He was a big man.” The boy spread his arms wide, then pointed at his head. “His hair was the color of the sun.”
That had to be the man who had chased him in Manhattan, Magee thought to himself. “Let’s go back to your village.”
“You no dig?” the boy asked curiously.
“No.”
The boy found it strange to have trekked so far through the jungle simply to turn back around again. But he had heard that Americans were odd, and this one with the scar running through his cheek certainly fit that description. He shrugged his shoulders. “Okay.”
As the boy turned to go, Magee stood up, slid a long serrated hunting knife from his combat belt, grabbed the boy around the face and plunged the blade deep into the boy’s throat, slicing it wide open. The boy dropped to the ground, grabbing at his neck, gasping for air. He writhed on the ground for a short time but soon lay still. Magee smiled. He could have simply snapped the boy’s thin neck, but he liked the sight of blood. Seward was right. He enjoyed killing. And the more painful the death, the better.
Magee removed the thirty dollars from a pocket of the boy’s grimy shorts, then picked up the body and hurled it into the water. It splashed loudly as it hit the surface. Within seconds Mag
ee saw the sinister eyes of crocodiles gliding just above the surface as the reptiles torpedoed toward the boy. Magee glanced up. High clouds bringing the afternoon rainstorm were beginning to form over the mountain crests off to the west. Between the crocodiles gorging themselves on the flesh and the rain washing away the blood, there would be no trace left of the boy in a very short time.
Magee picked up the shovel and began to dig.
8
The canoe bobbed and turned as Cole moved into the rapids, using deft strokes of his paddle as well as raw power to maintain perfect balance through the white water. At the bottom of the rapids, Cole steered into an eddy near the bank and looked back upriver. He laughed aloud as he watched Bennett struggling to maintain control of his craft. He was in no real danger because the river was relatively shallow here, but his pride was suffering a severe blow.
Cole dropped the anchor on shore, moved to the front of his canoe, leaned out and snagged the bow line of Bennett’s canoe as it floated swiftly past. All he had to do was hold on, and the canoe drifted out of the fast water and into the shallows with the current.
“Thanks,” Bennett yelled gratefully.
Cole smiled. “No problem.”
Ten minutes later they were feasting on a shore lunch of turkey sandwiches and potato salad, food Cole had brought with him from his aunt’s kitchen.
“This is good,” Bennett announced through a huge mouthful, glancing around. “Boy, it’s nice out here.”
“Yes, it is,” Cole agreed. It was another beautiful day. There were no clouds in the sky and the temperature had risen into the fifties, which was warm for northern Wisconsin at this time of year. “Now earn your lunch, Bennett.”
“Huh?” Bennett had just taken another bite of the sandwich.
“When we were back at the camp you told me that my father married Andrea Sage,” Cole reminded him. “That it was bizarre, but that the situation became even stranger.” Maybe Bennett had hoped Cole wouldn’t press for further information, but there wasn’t any chance of that.
The Legacy Page 9
