Saturday, April 6, was Lee’s last day at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall. He worked from 8:00 A.M. to 5:30 P.M., then returned home. He still had not told Marina that he had been fired. On Sunday, April 7, he vanished. He left the apartment with his rifle and stayed out all day. When he came home for supper at six that night, he no longer had the rifle. He left the apartment again after supper, and Marina does not remember at what hour he came home.
Lee’s activities that Sunday will never be known. But General Walker was due back in Dallas early the following week, and it is almost certain that Lee was keeping watch on his house at No. 4011 Turtle Creek Boulevard. He was ready to put his plan into action, and he later explained to Marina that he buried his rifle near Walker’s house that Sunday, in a wooded spot beside some railroad tracks that he had picked out and photographed exactly one month before. Lee’s hiding place, rendered better hidden still by large stacks of underbrush nearby, was in a park running northeast to southwest of Walker’s house, 25 to 30 feet above street level next to a footpath 90 feet from the curb line of Turtle Creek Boulevard. By the most direct auto route, it was not quite half a mile from the point where the footpath met the curb line to the Walker house. On foot, however, the spot could be reached by walking east or southeast from the rear of the house, and the distance was somewhat less.17
Monday, April 8, was Lee’s first day out of work. He deceived Marina by rising early as usual, putting on a T-shirt, and leaving the apartment as if he were going to work. Again he was out all day, and only one of his activities is known. He visited the Texas Employment Commission and told the sympathetic ladies there that he was out of a job. This time they did not come up with any leads. Once again he may also have been watching Walker’s house. If so, he surely noticed increased activities there. Walker came back, he himself recalls, “in the late afternoon or break of evening” that day.18
Lee had his supper at six. Then he went out again, and Marina, who had no idea that he had quit typing school, assumed that he had gone to Crozier Tech. She noticed that he returned earlier than usual after typing class, but it did not occur to her to ask why.
It was several days before she learned where he had been. After supper he bought a newspaper and boarded a bus, not the bus he took to Crozier Tech but one of several buses that would carry him close to the spot where he had buried his rifle. He was on his way to shoot General Walker.
On the bus, Lee was to claim later to Marina, he glanced at the church announcements in the paper. They were more numerous and more prominent than usual because it was Holy Week, the week between Palm Sunday and Easter. Reading the paper, he noticed that the Church of Latter Day Saints, the Mormon church at 4027 Turtle Creek Boulevard just behind General Walker’s house, was having a service Wednesday night that would get out at about nine o’clock. “Good,” Lee thought. “There’ll be people and cars around there on Wednesday and I’ll have a better chance of getting away.” He climbed off the bus, came home, and postponed his attack.19
The next day, Tuesday, April 9, Lee no longer pretended to go to work. He told Marina that it was a holiday and he was going to collect his paycheck. For the third time since his final Saturday at Jaggars-Chiles-Stovall, he was gone the whole day. He came home at six and after supper walked down the street as he often did to buy a newspaper and a bottle of Dr. Pepper. When he returned, he sat out on the balcony, where, after two months of being irritable—not, Marina says, on an ascending curve of irritability but merely irritable all the time, with an occasional outcropping of good humor—he unexpectedly turned tender toward her. “Come sit with me,” he coaxed her onto the balcony. He asked in the friendliest way whether she had heard from her girlfriends in Russia? Had she seen anything special in Soviet Belorussia or Krokodil? He drank a sip or two of his Dr. Pepper, then handed the bottle to her and grandly urged her to drink it all.
On the morning of Wednesday, April 10, Marina thought Lee looked pensive and rather sad. With tears in his eyes, he confessed at last that he had lost his job. “I don’t know why,” he said. “I tried. I liked that work so much. But probably the FBI came and asked about me, and the boss just didn’t want to keep someone the FBI was interested in. When will they leave me alone?”
Marina ached with sympathy. She had no idea how to comfort him, and when he went out for the day, she supposed he was looking for work. He was dressed in his good gray suit and a clean white shirt.20
As nearly as Marina can recall, Lee did not come home for supper that night. She waited until seven, an hour past their usual suppertime, then absent-mindedly cooked something for herself. Between eight and nine she was busy putting June to bed. Then she began to grow uneasy. Lee had taught her not to pry, not even to ask herself what he might be up to. He had accustomed her to his absences at hours when most workingmen and, above all, most family men, are at home with their wives. But Marina knew her husband well. For months he had been tense, preoccupied, ready, like his rifle, to “go off.” Nor, despite efforts to censor her curiosity, could she suppress an awareness that his comings and goings had been out of the ordinary. Now it turned out that he had been fired. Marina sensed, too clearly for her own peace of mind, that this element on top of the rest made up a recipe for danger, although what kind of danger she could not have said.
While she was waiting for Lee, she thought back to the last time he had been so late. It was their last week on Elsbeth Street, late in February.21 Frantic with worry, she had gone to the Tobiases next door and asked if she might use the phone. With Mrs. Tobias doing the dialing, she called George de Mohrenschildt, told him Lee had not come home, and asked him to find out what he could. George called the printing plant, then called back to report that Lee had left hours before. When he came home that night, Lee was angry at what Marina had done. He said his boss disapproved when the men got phone calls at work. He told her never to do it again.
Now Marina’s resources were more meager still. She no longer had a neighbor with a phone, and Lee no longer had a job where, in a pinch, she could try to reach him. There was nothing she could do but wait. She paced anxiously from room to room, doing her best not to think. On an impulse, about ten o’clock, she opened the door to her husband’s study. There on the desk she saw a key with a sheet of paper lying under it. At the sight of the key, Marina felt a thud inside: Lee was never coming back.
She picked up the paper and read the note he had left her in Russian.22
1. Here is the key to the post office box which is located in the main post office downtown on Ervay Street, the street where there is a drugstore where you always used to stand. The post office is four blocks from the drugstore on the same street. There you will find our mailbox. I paid for the mailbox last month so you needn’t worry about it.
2. Send information about what has happened to me to the Embassy [the Soviet Embassy in Washington] and also send newspaper clippings (if there’s anything about me in the papers). I think the Embassy will come quickly to your aid once they know everything.
3. I paid our rent on the second so don’t worry about it.
4. I have also paid for the water and gas.
5. There may be some money from work. They will send it to our post office box. Go to the bank and they will cash it.
6. You can either throw out my clothing or give it away. Do not keep it. As for my personal papers (both military papers and papers from the factory), I prefer that you keep them.
7. Certain of my papers are in the small blue suitcase.
8. My address book is on the table in my study if you need it.
9. We have friends here and the Red Cross will also help you.
10. I left you as much money as I could, $60 on the second of the month, and you and Junie can live for two months on $10 a week.
11. If I am alive and taken prisoner, the city jail is at the end of the bridge we always used to cross when we went to town (the very beginning of town after the bridge).
Marina’s eyes took in what Lee had writte
n, but her brain did not. She had no idea what his message was supposed to convey. Only two words meant anything to her. They were “prisoner” and “jail.” She saw them and started shaking all over.
At 11:30 Lee walked in, white, covered with sweat, his eyes glittering.
“What’s happened?” Marina asked.
“I shot Walker.” He was out of breath and could barely get out the words.
“Did you kill him?”
“I don’t know.”
“My God. The police will be here any minute. What did you do with the rifle?”
“Buried it.”
Marina’s teeth started to chatter. She was certain that police dogs would track down the rifle and be at the house any second.
“Don’t ask any questions.” Lee switched on the radio. There was no news. “And for God’s sake don’t bother me.” He peeled off his clothing and hurled himself on the bed. There he lay, spread-eagled, on his stomach. He fell asleep right away and slept soundly the whole night through.
Marina could not go to sleep. She lay awake for hours listening for the barking of police dogs and the footsteps of policemen on the staircase. She glanced over at Lee, who was lying like a dead man beside her, and she felt sorry for him. She felt a pity almost physical in its closeness and fear of what the police would do to him. “There will be time,” she thought, “to scold him and punish him later. But not now. Not while he is in danger.”
An idea flickered across her mind. She would go to the police and tell them, in sign language or some other way, what her husband had done. She put the thought aside. The truth is that she had no one to lean on but Lee and was deathly afraid of losing him. “I’ll be alone without a husband,” she said to herself, “and what good will that do anyone?” Nor, with her lack of English, did she know how to tell her story, much less make anyone believe her. The police would only send her home, and Lee would give her a beating.
So great was Marina’s dependence upon Lee that she did not consider other alternatives. She was forever picking up loose change from Lee’s bureau and buying the cigarettes he forbade her. She could have picked up a dime, called the de Mohrenschildts from a public phone, and asked them to drive her to the police station and interpret for her. Failing the de Mohrenschildts, she could, in sign language or in some other way, have asked her former neighbors, the Tobiases, to help, and they lived just around the corner. Nor did it occur to her that the police might be able to find a Russian interpreter.
Even if Marina had considered any of these alternatives, there was another factor that would have held her back: her Russianness.
She had grown up in a world where police spies are everywhere and it is your duty by law to inform on anyone, even the person closest to you, if you know he has committed a crime. Failure to do so makes you criminally as liable as he. In such an environment the only honor, the only way of keeping faith, is never, ever, to inform. The law says you must; Marina’s private morality says that you must not. And so it would be one thing to scold Lee harshly, to his face, and try to change him, or even to appeal to friends to try to change him, but quite another to go to the police or involve the state in any way. To do that would breach a relationship beyond repair.
Marina would have been incapable of going to court even in self-defense when her stepfather tried to frame her as a prostitute. As she saw it, her going to court against him, even though it was he who brought the charges, would have destroyed their relationship. Now it was the same with Lee. A wife would have to hate her husband to inform on him. How on earth could they live with one another, much less trust one another, after that? She did not know that in this matter Soviet and American law are directly opposite. Here, in most states, it was not her duty to go to the police; and she would not in any state have been allowed to testify against Lee in court. But since she assumed that her legal duty in the United States was exactly what it would have been in Russia, her failure to act made her in her eyes—and perhaps in Lee’s—his accomplice.23
So Marina did not go to the police, or consider it for more than a moment or two. Although she told herself that it was her legal duty to inform on Lee, her personal morality stressed loyalty to her husband above everything. And this loyalty was to expose her to a crushing sense of guilt when many people told her that if only she had gone to the police “after Walker,” a later, lethal event would not have happened. But even after that event, Marina’s feelings of guilt continued to cluster incongruously around the dim, but intact, figure of General Walker. Her guilt over her failure to inform on Lee “after Walker” was to save her, until she could better bear it, from facing the huge, intangible and infinitely more complex question of what responsibility, if any, she bore in a much greater tragedy.
— 25 —
Legacies
Marina woke up the next morning exhausted and with a headache. Lee was in the living room, leaning over the radio. He turned to her, crestfallen. “I missed. They don’t say much. Just that somebody unidentified took a shot at General Walker.”
Marina was hugely relieved, but she was still too nervous to touch her morning cup of coffee. Lee went out to buy a paper. When he came home he was angry. “Oh, hell!” he said. “Walker moved his head at the last minute. That’s the only thing that saved him. My aim was perfect. It was only accident that I missed.”
Marina now asked the question she had been wondering about all along. Who was Walker? She had heard the name before but she had no idea what he had done that might make Lee want to kill him.
Lee did not go into details. He merely said that Walker was a “Fascist” and a former general, a madman and the leader of a Fascist organization.
Marina objected that no matter who he was, Lee had no right to kill him. Maybe he had a wife and children.
“He lives alone,” Lee answered sharply. “If someone had killed Hitler in time, many lives would have been saved.”
That stopped Marina. All her life she had heard about Hitler’s atrocities, and she could not think how to respond. She asked Lee how he had escaped and where he had left his rifle.
General Walker, he told her, had been sitting at the back of his house near a window, working at his desk. Lee aimed and fired only one shot. He did not wait to see whether he had hit his mark. The church meeting next door was breaking up. Plenty of people, plenty of noise. Lee ran. By the time he heard the wail of police sirens, he was far, far away.
It is not clear from Marina’s account whether Lee rode one bus home that night or two. It is logical that he would have run straight through the woods to his hiding place, buried the rifle, then hurried to a bus stop and ridden home. But it is not certain he did it that way. Marina, for some reason, was haunted by the idea of police dogs. They would pick up Lee’s scent and trace the rifle to its hiding place. “Don’t worry about the dogs,” Lee reassured her. “Lots of people go by that house. So they trace it as far as the bus. That’s where they lose the scent. I buried it a long way off.” From that remark it could be inferred that Lee boarded a bus near Walker’s house actually carrying his rifle, hopped off close to his site in the woods, buried the rifle, then took another bus home. He did tell Marina that the bus he took was not the one he generally rode when he went to General Walker’s.1
The Dallas papers of Thursday, April 11, ran front-page stories about the attempt on Walker’s life. Lee left the apartment to buy both morning and afternoon editions and lay on the sofa listening to news bulletins on the radio. It was reported that the police had identified the bullet as a 30.06. It was also reported that an aide to the general had noticed two men in a “late-model, unlicensed car” in the alley behind Walker’s house on the night of his return. After the shooting, a fourteen-year-old boy, Kirk Newman, who was a neighbor of Walker’s, claimed that he had seen two cars, one with one man in it, the other with several, speed away from the scene.
Reading that, Lee roared with laughter. “Americans are so spoiled!” he said, proud of his escape. “It never oc
curs to them that you might use your own two legs. They always think you have a car. They chased a car. And here I am sitting here!” Once again he said that before any car left the scene, “my legs had carried me a long way.”2
Lee also laughed at the police identification of the badly smashed bullet.3 “They got the bullet—found it in the chimney,” he said. “They say I had a .30 caliber bullet when I didn’t at all. They’ve got the bullet and the rifle all wrong. Can’t even figure that out. What fools!”
Low as his opinion of the police was, Lee was angry at himself and disappointed. “It was such an easy shot,” he said again and again. “How on earth did I miss? A single second saved him. I fired and he moved. A perfect shot if only he hadn’t moved!”4
That Thursday morning, only a few hours after his attempt on Walker’s life, Marina saw Lee thumbing through the blue looseleaf notebook in which he kept his typing lessons. She noticed that he stopped now and then to read a page.
“And what is that?” she asked.
“My plan.”
“And those pictures?”
“Walker’s house.”
He was sitting on the sofa with the notebook in his lap. Marina stood facing him across the coffee table. “May I see?”
He handed it to her. She saw photographs of a house from various angles, and the book was filled with lined sheets covered with handwriting. There were pages of typing, too, and Marina guessed—correctly—that some of the handwriting, all of which was in English, was the political justification for Lee’s act.
“I had it so well figured out,” he boasted. “I couldn’t make a mistake. It was only accident that I missed.”
Marina realized that he was proud of himself. “And what do you mean to do with this book?” she asked.
Marina and Lee Page 45
