by Tim Baker
‘Yes.’
The lisping voice continues. ‘Load the money into four large suitcases—black, all the same size.’
‘The same size.’
‘Put them in the back of the car, not the trunk.’
‘Not the trunk . . . ’
‘Just the driver, understand?’ He’s not going anywhere near a fancy word like chauffeur. ‘The driver goes to the corner of Jefferson and Lincoln. Four o’clock.’
‘But that’s only one hour.’
‘The driver’s not alone, the kid is dead.’
‘He will be alone.’
‘He better be. Tell the driver to wait at the gas station.’
‘What does he do there?’
‘He waits by the phone booth, and when the phone rings, he answers it. Got it?’
‘And you will tell him what to do?’
‘He will follow instructions or the kid is dead.’
‘He will, he will.’
The voice is growing looser, more assured. He’s going off script, happy with the fear he has created. Happy to have the power. ‘We see any cops, we smell a setup and the kid is dead. Anything suspicious and the kid is dead, got that?’
‘Yes.’
‘Say it . . . ’
The power has taken over. He can’t let go. It doesn’t make sense. He didn’t know the Old Man was in a wheelchair, but one thing’s for sure: he hates him. I look up at Sam. He’s nodding, almost smiling. He knows what the kidnapper has forgotten—this call’s way too long. They’re getting their trace. Sam’s hand scratches. Not here, please anywhere but here. The pencil stops its journey. I can tell from the way he is concentrating, it is a real address. He’s trying to locate it. Opposite us, the call is still going on.
‘Any police . . . ’
‘Any police.’
‘And the kid is dead, say it.’
‘Ronnie . . . dies.’
Disconnection buzzes through the room. Old Man Bannister gazes at the telephone the way Cleopatra must have gazed at the asp after its bite, then lets it drop with a mixture of disgust and regret, the ivory mouthpiece shattering on the floor. He heaves his chair towards me at a surprising pace, so fast that for a second I think he is trying to run me down. ‘You will find these men and bring them to me.’
I exchange looks with Schiller, our minds alive to what would happen if I did.
‘Promise me.’
‘Mr. Bannister, you know I can’t . . . ’
The Old Man snatches my necktie and pulls me down towards him, his brute force surprising. ‘You find these men and bring them to me and I’ll tell you who killed your brother.’
He releases me, riding backwards across the room, like a lifeboat cut away from a sinking vessel. My head thumps with the dual destructive promises of revenge and hatred. Revenge for Tommy and hatred for the Old Man. Mrs. Bannister pushes him out of the room, her eyes seeking to communicate with me, imploring me not to listen to him. Schiller pulls me aside. ‘Forget about Tommy,’ he whispers. ‘He’s bluffing.’
I remember the look in the Old Man’s eyes when he pulled me down towards him, his sickened breath fouling the air around us. You don’t need to bluff when the cards are all marked and you’re the only one who knows how to read them. I shove past Schiller and grab the piece of paper with the address. ‘Alameda Street?’
‘Chinatown.’ He snatches the phone, already barking orders into the handset. ‘Six squad cars, now!’
‘Are you nuts? You heard what he said about cops.’
‘That was for the drop-off at Jefferson and Lincoln.’
‘You’ve got just under an hour to pack those suitcases and get the driver to the rendezvous.’
‘Where are you going?’
‘I’m going to stake out the phone booth, follow the pickup, nail the kidnappers, get the boy, and then find out who killed my brother.’
CHAPTER 27
Dallas 2014
Camelot was Animal White House, a frat party on a grand scale, with JFK as amphetamine-fuelled house master, McNamara as the needy nerd, McGeorge Bundy as the nasty prick, and Rusk as the loveable Dean. Key Kennedy aides played the salivating frat brats, profiting from the mayhem whenever and wherever they could, especially when it came to the gals. This was the mid-century continental shift in the American political landscape. Tammany Hall was beer and bucks. Camelot was gear and fucks.
King Jack didn’t need Viagra, his lifestyle was his own little blue pill. He didn’t know that part of his problem came from quack doctors pumping him full of all-American, red-blooded testosterone. He didn’t realize that his craving for salted peanuts and his suntanned good looks were connected to Addison’s disease. Amphetamines, hydrocortisone, anabolic steroids and call girls. These were the treatments liberally doled out in the Mad Men days to America’s youngest president, and paradoxically, one of its sickest. JFK cried out for a rehab clinic, but by the time Betty Ford came around, it was all too late.
The Secret Service was in on the act too. They all knew about JFK’s shenanigans. They didn’t care as long as King Jack maintained his Round Table policy; as long as they got their fair share of bare derrière.
Sex was JFK’s snake oil. It was his pain’s H-Bomb. The agents of the Secret Service didn’t have the same excuse. The Secret Service boys didn’t suffer from bad backs; they didn’t score daily jabs of speed, whizz and throttle; they didn’t cramp up with chronic pain; their skin didn’t glow orange like a lava lamp. They drove muscle cars, ate apple pie and used racist insults. And, according to Annette Martinez, they killed the president.
‘Why did they stop the presidential limousine when fired upon?’ she asks, freezing the video and pointing to the evidence: brake lights red as police sirens pulsing at the back of the limo. ‘Why did they specifically act against operational procedure? When you’re fired on, you flee. They ignored protocol.’
Annette Martinez has a point. I watch the film again on her home cinema setup. Her screen is so large, I have to move my seat backwards.
I had been prepared to lump Annette Martinez in the same basket as Dwayne Wayne and Miriam Marshall, but looking at the footage she’s showing me, I have the feeling that I was wrong; very wrong.
The braking limousine is one of the great enigmas of the Kennedy Assassination, and one of the only existing examples of actual physical evidence that there may have been a conspiracy. Red means stop: even the Warren Commission must have known that. Ms. Martinez is right—why did they slam on the brakes instead of putting the pedal to the metal? The first answer that springs to mind is the most alarming: to allow an easier target. It’s a lot harder hitting a head that’s moving. Why didn’t the conduct of the driver, William Greer, come up at the Warren Commission? Another easy answer: nothing came up at the Warren Commission; it was what went down that counted.
Greer is not the only person of interest in the presidential limousine. Sitting next to Greer in the front of the Lincoln, agent Roy Kellerman hunkers down in the passenger seat, showing a disconcerting lack of interest in events right behind him as bullets zing around the limo like crazed pinballs.
We have been taught that the Secret Service is there to ‘take the bullet’ for the president, but Kellerman seems to be taking five, not a slug. It’s as though his earpiece was tuned to the Mantovani Strings, not the Dead Kennedys. There is never any sense that he is about to leap out of his seat and sprawl across the president—to realize the Secret Service agent’s ultimate fantasy and transmute into a human shield. From the president’s limo, there was not even a duck, let alone a cover.
At least Greer managed a look over his shoulder, and it was that distracted glance, like a flustered cabbie turning to watch a sex act in the backseat, that gave birth to one of the most persistent of conspiracy rumours: that Greer himself fired the shot that killed JFK. As Greer turns in the Zaprud
er footage, he appears to be holding a pistol in his hand, pointing straight at the president. It fooled me when I first saw it. But after several reruns, the ‘pistol’ turns into the top of Kellerman’s head as it catches the fast, metallic glint of Texas sunlight, then, after a couple more viewings, it turns back into a pistol. What is disconcerting about the illusion is that the appearance of a ‘pistol’ aimed at Kennedy coincides exactly with the lethal head shot. The timing is perfect. It’s like the Spinning Dancer silhouette: changing backwards and forwards constantly. Gun, head. Head, gun. Gun, head, head, gun.
But the footage Ms. Martinez shows doesn’t appear to be illusionary. Time and time again, in an endless loop of responsibility, Greer and Kellerman appear to do nothing. They sit still as crash-test dummies as they take the 90-degree turn from Main into Houston, and then the 70-degree turn into Dealey Plaza. The Killing Field.
There is the first shot . . .
The limousine’s brake lights come on and the car slows almost to a complete standstill. Both Greer and Kellerman as well as Governor and Mrs. Connolly can be seen lurching forwards with the sudden halt. Then there is the kill shot. The explosion on the right side of the president’s head, coming from the front of the president and to his right. The limo speeds away, but it’s too late.
Forget the hospital, it was already time to visit the morgue. JFK is DOA.
The body was taken to the Dallas coroner’s, which had jurisdiction. But the city’s forensic examiner, Dr. Rose, was stopped from performing the autopsy. At gunpoint. The only time a weapon was drawn in Dallas, it was not to defend the president but to threaten a doctor trying to uphold the law. Dr. Rose had to make do with the autopsy of Lee Harvey Oswald, while the president’s remains were effectively kidnapped and sent to Bethesda Naval Hospital for a nightmarish autopsy straight out of The X-Files.
Ms. Martinez shows me amateur film I’ve never seen before, shot in cheery Technicolor hues, an impossibly optimistic world that never actually existed. It is footage mainly of the crowd waiting with enthusiasm and excitement. A police officer forces a number of bystanders off the edge of the road and back onto the curb. The crowd complies with obvious regret. This was before the Vietnam War, in the days when one cop could still tell ten people what to do. The streets are wide; the motorcycle cops impressive as they herald the president’s limo, SS-100-X zooming past the camera, which is on Jackie’s side. Jackie looks radiant; Jack looks handsome. They are a young, dynamic couple: confident; easygoing yet dignified. If you saw them, you’d say they were in love.
‘There.’ Ms. Martinez’s voice brings me out of my reverie.
She has frozen the footage. An agent is riding on the back of the president’s limo, just moments before the shooting . . . ‘Why did he drop back to the follow car just moments before the shooting? Answer me that, Mr. Alston.’
The use of my name cannot strip away the rhetorical nature of the question. No one can answer anything. Dallas is a perfect matrix of give and take, assertion and denial, truth and deception. Affirmation meets Rebuttal in an endless, senseless dance. Head, gun, gun, head. Dallas is the cradle of ambiguity and its homecoming queen is the Spinning Dancer.
I glance back one last time at the silver screen when a notion hits me with the force of a Magic Bullet.
What if the driver, Greer, realized that shots were being fired from in front of the vehicle? From the Grassy Knoll. Wouldn’t the normal physical reaction—as opposed to the trained Secret Service response—be to slam on the brakes? Isn’t that what we’d all do at night, driving on a rain-slick road in the countryside when a child suddenly appears, staring into the headlights with a ball in his hands? We’re supposed to decelerate slowly and gear down. But instead we slam on the brakes, and the tires lock, and the sweet hush of rubber on wet macadam gives way to the screech of lost control as we careen towards the very object we are trying most to avoid.
Greer hit the brakes the way we would all hit the brakes: because his gut told him to. The brain is always left behind in the panic rush of adrenaline. Bullets were coming Greer’s way from the Grassy Knoll and he blanked out—he just couldn’t remember what else to do except stop and wait for the cops.
Ms. Martinez believes the evidence of the archive films points to a conspiracy. But what if the conspiracy didn’t involve the Secret Service? What if the film proves there were other shooters on the Grassy Knoll?
‘It’s such a crying shame,’ Ms. Martinez says.
Shame is right. The Assassination and its aftermath is a well of tears. It is the fatal junction. When citizens stopped believing in their government and gave up on notions of social cohesion. When words like ‘Belief’ and ‘Faith’ broke off from the continental shelf of Solemnity and began to drift into the Sea of Irony. When ‘I have a dream’ turned into ‘We have a nightmare.’ Vietnam and Watergate, Martin Luther King and RFK. AIDS. Famine. Global Warming. Globalization and the Not So Free Market. A half-century-long rampage for wealth, and it all went one way. Less Trickle Down, more To Have and Have Not. The rich got super richer. And the poor got fired and evicted.
Would it have been any different if JFK had not been killed?
Almost certainly, no.
Yet people need to believe in the possibility of Change; of Parallel Universes.
Maybe that’s the biggest Conspiracy Theory of them all: that one man can actually change the State of Things.
‘A crying shame . . . ’ Ms. Martinez repeats, actually wiping away a tear as she guides me to the front door.
I find myself nodding in dutiful sympathy, like an usher at a funeral home. At least Ms. Martinez has closure. She’s skipped to the last page of her whodunit and found the killer. Case closed. She is not haunted by car horns like Adam Granston. She’s not selling information for a bourbon and Coke like Tex Jeetton, or chasing a million bucks for a photo like Dwayne Wayne. She has been spared Alien Abduction. She has her assassination movies to watch on her home cinema system. She doesn’t like their endings, but at least the narrative makes sense.
To her.
But what about the rest of us? The ones who can’t make sense of our own times and our own lives, let alone something that happened half a century ago. Everyone carries a Dallas inside them. A milestone event rich with alternative endings. I know what mine is: the Bannister case. The destruction of my father and the belief that he was innocent. But there is something else there that is stronger than regret or remorse; something that puts me in the same category as my witnesses. It is the conviction that one day I will uncover the truth. Not that I will ever solve the mysteries of the murders of Jack and Bobby, but I will discover what really happened to Ronnie Bannister.
BOOK TWO
The Big Deceit
CHAPTER 28
Los Angeles 1960
I pull the curtain back just far enough to see out.
Old Man Bannister’s driver, Taylor, parks the car just past the gas station. He looks so vivid and vulnerable through the unforgiving snare of the binoculars that I can hear the slam of the car door in my mind as he gets out, sweat stains shining through the livery of his chauffeur’s uniform.
Taylor walks back towards the gas pumps, shaking his head at an attendant who comes out, heading over to the telephone booth standing just beyond the john . . . Leaving a million in cash unattended inside the goddamn car. I can even see the sparkle of the keys he’s left in the ignition, dangling beside the wheel.
I replay the call in my head. Was this the plan? Didn’t they tell the chauffeur to drive up to the telephone, or was that just something I assumed?
This is the problem with ransoms—too many instructions, too many people looking over their backs, too many tails to lose. With all the second-guessing, the whole damn thing becomes so complicated that people get confused.
Honest mistakes are made.
And innocent children are slain.
Or maybe the driver got it right. Maybe Taylor was doing exactly what he was supposed to. Maybe they were planning a simple snatch and run right there, out in the false open—a terrain that was actually cluttered with obstacles, hiding places and getaways. Maybe the attendant was one of them.
Or were the kidnappers watching anxiously right now, as nervous and surprised as me, cursing the driver, urging him to go back and wait inside the car. Protect the cash from a potential thief who could end up driving away with more than he bargained for.
The fleabag hotel I had found for the stakeout was perfect cover and profiled a clear view of the terrain even without the binoculars. So perfect in fact that I took the time to check the rooms in case the kidnappers were set up here as well. But all I found was an exhausted, middle-aged couple sleeping it off and a young, newly-arrived Okie already on his second pint of rye. There had been no suspicious cars out in the parking lot at the back, but I overfilled the oil in all of them anyway. You just never know.
I survey the streets one last time then go back to the gas station. It’s all clear on my side. But my side is only part of the picture and as far as I know, what is going on down there is being shot in VistaVision. I check the time. Ten minutes and counting . . .
The driver looks up suddenly, as though someone is pointing a gun at him and then he grabs the door of the phone booth, yanking instead of pushing, the whole booth shaking with the force of his frustration. With his fear.
An auto mechanic comes out of the service garage, wiping his hands on a rag, and calls out, annoyance on his face. Message received. Taylor shoves the door so hard, he staggers in, and I see him grimace as he hits his ribs against the phone shelf. It would be crassly comic if a child’s life wasn’t at stake.
Taylor answers the phone. Why are they calling early? I sweep the field of play. Nothing.
An oil tank truck slows to turn into the gas station, obscuring the phone box and the car. I watch it belch black fumes into the air. Smoke signals. Communication from the old days. Did the kidnappers know there was going to be a delivery? The whole truck shudders as it waits for the traffic to pass, the first impatient horns already serenading it with LA’s highway melody.
