“I’m going to bed,” he said. “I probably won’t be out this weekend.”
“Why not?”
“It’s too often. I was here today.”
“Okay,” Marina said.
Ruth was aware of Lee padding back and forth between his bedroom and the bathroom getting ready for bed. It was about ten o’clock, an hour earlier than was usual for him before a workday. Ruth went to the garage and painted blocks for her children for half an hour or so. Someone had been there before her, left the light on, and moved a few things around.18 She supposed that Lee had gone there to fetch some clothing, for the weather was turning cool and the Oswalds had their warm clothes in the garage. But Ruth did think it careless of Lee to have left the light on.19 When she returned to the living room, she and Marina sat on the sofa, folded more laundry, talked of nothing in particular, and said good night.
Marina as usual was the last to bed. She sat in the tub for an hour, “warming her bones” and thinking about nothing in particular, not even Lee’s request that she move in to Dallas. Lee was lying on his stomach with his eyes closed when she crept into bed. Marina still had pregnancy privileges; that is, she was allowed to sleep with her feet on whatever part of his anatomy they came to rest. About three in the morning, she thinks, she put a foot on his leg. Lee was not asleep, and suddenly, with a sort of wordless vehemence, he lifted her leg, shoved her foot hard, then pulled his leg away.
“My, he’s in a mean mood,” Marina thought. She realized that he was sleepless, tense, and she believed that he was so angry at her for refusing to move to Dallas right away that it was no use trying to talk to him. She thinks that he fell asleep about five o’clock in the morning.
Lee usually woke up before the alarm rang and shut it off so as not to disturb the children. On the morning of Friday, November 22, the alarm rang, and he did not wake up.
Marina was awake, and after about ten minutes she said, “Time to get up, Alka.”
“Okay.”
He rose, washed, and got dressed. Then he came over to the bed. “Have you bought those shoes you were going to get?”
“No. I haven’t had time.”
“You must get those shoes, Mama. And Mama, don’t get up. I’ll get breakfast myself.”
Lee kissed the children, who were sleeping. But he did not kiss Marina, as he always did before he left in the morning. He got as far as the bedroom door, then came back and said, “I’ve left some money on the bureau. Take it and buy everything you and Junie and Rachel need. Bye-bye.” Then Lee went out the door.
“Good God,” thought Marina. “What has happened to my husband that he has all of a sudden gotten so kind?” Then she fell back to sleep.
During the days and weeks that followed, Marina realized that there had been several small, out-of-the-way occurrences during Lee’s brief visit. He had played much longer than he usually did with Junie out of doors the day before. Could he have been saying good-bye to the creature whom he loved more than anyone else on earth? It seemed to Marina, looking back, that there had been a farewell quality to his playing, something valedictory almost, in the way he reached out for the falling oak wings. He had never reached for them before. And his being unable to tell her anything about President Kennedy’s visit had been out of character, to say the least.
He had been angry and tense in bed that night, and it was nearly morning before he fell asleep. Marina supposed he was just angry at her for refusing to give in to him. Later on she wondered, what had he been thinking about?
There was the odd circumstance of his telling her not to get up to fix his breakfast. There was no danger that she would—she had never done so before. Why would he tell her not to? Could it be that he did not want to run the tiniest risk of her seeing him enter the garage—and leave it?
Then there was his telling her with unaccustomed gentleness to buy everything she and the children needed. He had never told her such a thing before. When she got up that morning and looked into the bureau, she found the extraordinary sum of $170. It must have been nearly everything Lee had.
And Marina also remembered that twice after his arrival in the afternoon, he had tried to kiss her and she had turned him away. It was only on the third try, when he had his arm around her, that she relented and allowed him an obligatory kiss. He had tried to be tender with her, and she had been obdurate with him.
Finally, she remembered one more thing, the most earthshaking of all. Three times he had begged her to move to Dallas with him “soon.” Three times she had refused. And he had tried to kiss her three times. Everything had happened in threes. That, for Marina, was the key.
— 36 —
November 22, 1963
About 7:15 on the morning of November 22, Linnie Mae Randle was standing by her kitchen sink when, through the window, she saw Lee coming from the Paines’ house carrying a long brown package. She opened her back door a bit to see what he was doing. He walked up to her brother’s car, opened the right rear door, and put the package on the back seat. Mrs. Randle went back to the sink, looked up a moment later, and there, staring in at her through the window, was Lee. Startled, she called to her brother, Wesley Frazier, that Lee was waiting for his ride.1
The two men climbed in the car and started off. As they were going out the drive, Frazier glanced in the rear and noticed a long brown package extending halfway across the back seat. He asked Lee what it was, and Lee mumbled something about curtain rods. “Oh, yes,” said Frazier. “You said you were going to get some yesterday.”2
The two men drove into Dallas, and Frazier parked the car in a lot two blocks from the depository building. They usually walked from the lot together, but this morning Lee got out of the car first, picked up the package, and walked to the building ahead of Frazier.
At 8:00 A.M. Roy Truly, superintendent of the Texas School Book Depository, and William Shelley, Lee’s supervisor, arrived at the building. Both noticed that Lee was already at work.3 Charles Douglas Givens, who waited each morning for Lee to finish reading in the domino room before going in to read the papers himself, noticed that Lee did not go to the domino room that day.4
Lee went about his job of filling orders, and sometime between 9:30 and 10:00, he and another order filler, James (“Junior”) Jarman, were on the first floor in a room filled with bins. Lee was at the window, Jarman joined him, and Lee asked what the people were gathering on the corner for. Jarman, who had only just found out himself, said that the president was supposed to pass by. Lee asked Jarman if he knew which way the president was coming.
“I told him, yes. He [would] probably come down Main and turn on Houston and then back again on Elm.”
“Oh, I see,” Lee said and went back to filling orders.5 The turn from Houston into Elm would bring the presidential motorcade directly in front of the southeast corner of the Book Depository Building.
President Kennedy’s plane, Air Force One, landed at Love Field at 11:40 that morning. Vice President Johnson, whose plane had landed a few moments before, was there with Mrs. Johnson to greet President and Mrs. Kennedy and Governor and Mrs. Connally after their brief flight from Fort Worth. There was a welcoming ceremony before the Kennedys boarded the presidential limousine for the drive through Dallas. The limousine was a specially designed Lincoln convertible equipped with a bubble top. But the weather was clear, and the president had asked to have the bubble removed. He sat in the right rear seat with Mrs. Kennedy at his left. Governor and Mrs. Connally rode in jump seats in front of the Kennedys. The presidential party was due at the Trade Mart for lunch at 12:30.
At the book depository, Charles Douglas Givens, Bonnie Ray Williams, and three other men were laying a new plywood floor on the sixth floor of the building. At 11:40 A.M. Williams saw Lee on the east side of the sixth floor but paid no attention to what he was doing.6 There were Scott-Foresman books on that floor, and he could have been filling orders.7
At 11:45 or 11:50 the five men who were laying the floor broke for lunch. They
headed for the west, or rear, side of the building, got on the freight elevators, and raced each other to the ground floor. On the way down they saw Lee standing by the fifth-floor gate.8
Once he was on the ground floor, Givens realized that he had left his jacket, with his cigarettes in it, on the sixth floor. He rode back up and once again saw Lee. He was on the sixth floor now, not the fifth, and instead of being on the northwest side of the building, where Givens had seen him at the elevator gate, he was walking toward the elevators from the southeast corner, the corner overlooking the route the presidential motorcade was scheduled to take. Lee was carrying his clipboard, but he did not have any books in his hand, and he did not appear to be filling orders.9 The time was 11:55.
The men who were laying the new floor had moved a lot of heavy cartons from the west to the east side of the sixth floor. The southeast corner window, in particular, was totally shielded from view because cartons had been stacked around it in a crescent.10 Lee appeared to be coming from that window.
“Boy, are you going downstairs? It’s near lunchtime,” said Givens.
“No, sir,” Lee said. “And when you get downstairs, close the elevator gate.”11 The elevator was automatic and would operate only if the gate was closed.
“Okay,” said Givens and rode the elevator down.
There was a good deal of excitement about the motorcade among the men at the book depository. In order to watch, a lot of them took their sandwiches outside and ate in front of the building. Harold Norman and “Junior” Jarman went outside but then decided that they would get a better view from inside. They went to the rear of the building and took an elevator to the fifth floor. Meanwhile, Bonnie Ray Williams had eaten his lunch—chicken, Fritos, and a bottle of Dr. Pepper—by the third or fourth set of windows on the south side of the sixth floor. He could see nothing to the east of him because the cartons were stacked up so high.12 But he thought there was nobody there, and he wanted someone to watch the motorcade with. He went down a flight of stairs and found Norman and Jarman in the southeast corner windows of the fifth floor. He took a position at a window near theirs. The time was 12:20 P.M.
The presidential motorcade had left Love Field just before noon, and the procession of cars drove rapidly through the thinly populated outskirts of Dallas. The crowds were large and enthusiastic when the motorcade reached the downtown area. The president’s limousine traveled along Main Street, turned right on Houston, and headed toward the intersection of Houston and Elm Streets. The limousine slowed to about eleven miles an hour as it made the sharp left turn into Elm, directly in front of the southeast corner of the faded, orange-brick Book Depository Building. It then began to move slowly downhill away from the building. The time was 12:30 P.M.
Just then, from their lookouts at the southeast corner windows of the fifth floor, Bonnie Ray Williams and Harold Norman saw the president raise his right hand as if to salute or brush back his hair.13 It was a movement they had seen him make on television. But as he did it, they heard a sound like a shot. “Junior” Jarman and Williams thought it was a motorcycle backfire. Then there was another sound, and out on Dealey Plaza people started dropping to the ground in fright. The president’s car lurched forward, and there was a third sound right after the second. Two of the three men on the fifth floor saw the president slump, or “lean his head,” but they did not see any more.
Bonnie Ray Williams paid no attention to the first shot “because I did not know what was happening.” But he says, “the second shot, it sounded like it was right in the building, the second and third shot. And it sounded—it even shook the building, the side we were on. Cement fell on my head.” The floor above was nothing but bare boards with daylight showing between them, and Norman and Jarman saw dust in Williams’s hair. “You got something on your head,” Norman said. “Yes, man, don’t you brush it out,” Jarman added.14
Because of his location in the southeast corner window of the fifth floor, it was Harold Norman who heard the most. He did not hear anybody move above him, no creaking, no human sound. But what he did hear, with the bare floor only 12 or 14 feet overhead acting as a sounding board, was the bolt action of a rifle clicking three times, and the thump, thump, thump of three expended cartridges dropping to the floor. “Man,” he said to the others, “someone is shooting at the president and it’s coming from right over us. It even shook the building.”15
Jarman said, “We’d better get the hell out of here.”16
All three men knew where the assassin was—he was directly over their heads. None of them was armed. And none of the three wanted to go upstairs for fear of being shot to death. And yet they did a curious thing. They looked out the window and saw everyone, people, policemen, running toward the opposite side of the building where, for some onlookers, the crack of the rifle appeared to have come from. Williams said, “We know the shots came from practically over our head. But since everybody was running, you know, to the west side of the building, towards the railroad tracks, we assumed maybe somebody was down there. And so we all ran that way, the way that the people was running, and we was looking out the window.”17
Lee had stationed himself in the southeast corner window of the sixth floor, barricaded inside the crescent of book cartons. No one had seen him that morning as he carried his brown paper package to the window, removed the rifle, assembled and loaded it. No one saw him toss the empty sack into the corner where it was later found. Nor did anyone see him as he arranged a book carton and two smaller cartons as a gun rest in front of the window.
He sat on another carton and waited until the president’s car came into view. He took aim and fired three quick shots. At the moment of the final, farthest shot, President Kennedy was about 88 yards away. Through Lee’s four-power telescopic sight, he appeared to be only 22 yards away.18 After firing his last shot, Lee moved rapidly from the front to the rear of the sixth floor and crammed the rifle, scope up, on the floor between cartons that were stacked up just before the entrance to the stairway.
A Dallas patrolman, Marrion L. Baker, was on his motorcycle at a point in the motorcade several cars behind the president and was headed straight for the School Book Depository when he heard the first shot. Baker had lately been deer hunting, and he was certain that the shot was from a high-powered rifle. He looked up and saw pigeons scattering from their perches atop the building. He raced his motorcycle to the building, dismounted, and pushed his way to the entrance. There he encountered Roy Truly, who identified himself, and the two men ran for the elevators in back. Finding that both were on an upper floor, they started up the stairs. It was less than two minutes since the last shot had been fired.
When Truly and Baker reached the second-floor landing, Baker caught a glimpse of someone in the lunchroom. Revolver in hand, he rushed to the door and saw a man twenty feet away walking to the far end of the room. The man was empty-handed. Baker ordered him to turn and walk toward him. The man obeyed. He seemed normal and not out of breath. Truly was on his way to the third floor, missed the patrolman, and ran back to see what was delaying him. He found Baker face to face with Lee Oswald, his revolver pointed straight at him. Lee did not look excited; startled, perhaps, but not excited.19
“Do you know this man? Does he work here?” Baker asked.
“Yes,” Truly said.
Baker lowered his revolver, and the two men went on with their search.
Mrs. Robert Reid, a clerical supervisor, had watched the motorcade from the front of the building. When she heard the shots, she ran back inside, hoping that none of the employees was going to fall under suspicion. She was entering her office on the second floor when Lee entered from the opposite, or lunchroom side, where there was a Coke machine. He was holding a full bottle of Coca-Cola.
“Oh,” said Mrs. Reid, “the president has been shot, but maybe they didn’t hit him.”
Lee mumbled something in reply, seemingly “very calm.” Both of them kept on walking, and that was the end of the encounter.20
Lee crossed the second floor, walked down the stairs to the ground floor, and left the building by the main entrance. Outside, a crew-cut young man, who Lee thought was from the Secret Service but who may have been Robert MacNeil, a reporter for NBC, dashed up to ask where he could find a telephone. Very calmly, Lee pointed to the building and told the man that he thought he could find a pay phone inside. About three minutes had elapsed since the last shot had been fired.
Lee walked seven short blocks east on Elm Street and boarded a bus that was headed back toward the School Book Depository en route to Oak Cliff. He was spotted immediately by Mrs. Mary Bledsoe, his reluctant landlady during the week of October 7, as he passed her to take a seat in the middle of the bus. Later she said that he looked “like a maniac.” “He looked so bad in the face,” his face was “distorted.” He was dirty, he had a hole in his right shirtsleeve, and the buttons had been torn off his shirt.21
“The president has been shot,” the bus driver said, and the passengers started talking about it. “Hope they don’t shoot us,” someone said. Traffic was in a hopeless snarl, and in four minutes the bus had gone only two blocks. Lee slipped out the front, not neglecting, as he went, to pick up a transfer to another bus bound for Oak Cliff.
He had so far tried two means of escape that he had used after the Walker attempt, his own feet and the bus. Now he tried something else. Four blocks from the place where he left the bus, he went up to a cab that was standing near the Greyhound Station. The driver, William Whaley, was about to get out to buy himself a pack of cigarettes. He later remembered that a man dressed in work clothes approached, asked politely, “May I have this cab?” and, Russian fashion, climbed into the front seat beside him.
Just then an elderly lady stuck her head in the window past the passenger and asked the driver to call her a cab.
Marina and Lee Page 66
