"That's some story," said Marlene. "So what does Hank want you to do with it after all this time? You said a book…"
"Yes, the book. He's collected boxes of stuff over the years. The trial transcripts, clippings, papers written about the case. It was quite a thing for a while among the liberals. Richard was what I think they called prematurely coexistent. He was opposed to the nuclear sub program. He thought it was a provocation, especially if the subs were going to have nukes in them. He thought it probably wasn't a good idea to have a navy captain who might be cut off from communications with the outside be responsible for pushing a button that might blow up the world. Richard didn't think much of most navy captains. There was a lot of talk about a dark conspiracy. Dreyfus Two."
"You're saying somebody set him up?"
Maggie shrugged. "What do I know? It's the family myth, anyway. Rickover and the hard-line cold warriors did him in. That's what the book's supposed to be about, but"-she shrugged again, helplessly-"I've made a start, an index of the material we have, and I've made a trip or two to archives, but Christ, Marlene, I did some research in college, but this needs a pro, a lawyer preferably, or a real investigative reporter."
"Why doesn't he hire one?"
"Control. He wants to keep total control. And I am apparently the only person he considers under total control, lucky me." She let out a bitter laugh. "Maybe when the kids are grown, if I still have a brain in my head…"
"Or…," said Marlene tentatively.
"Or what?"
"Well, my dear, not to blow my own horn, but beneath these colorful rags is a fairly hotshot criminal investigator. I could maybe take a look at your stuff-at least get you started."
Maggie's eyes went wide. "Oh, God, would you really? Oh, but Hank might, I don't know…" She stopped in confusion.
"Object?" offered Marlene, raising an eyebrow. "To a woman who made a total ass of herself at his party delving into the intimate family secrets? Well, you don't have to tell him unless you want to."
Maggie was pacing back and forth behind the counter, conflicting emotions playing over her small features. Finally, she whirled, jutted her sharp chin, brought her fist down on the counter, and said, "Yeah! Let's go for it!"
The women shook hands and laughed. Then a doubtful look appeared on Maggie's face. "But, Marlene, I mean you can't just do this, like, for nothing… your time…"
At that moment a heavy car door slammed and they heard shrill voices and the sound of footsteps on gravel. The back door flew open with a crash and the children dashed in, Laura dragging a sniveling Jeremy behind her. "Mommy!" she yelled. "Stupid Jeremy wet his pants!"
Marlene said, "Maggie, I tell you what. Just handle the three kids for half days. I'll take care of the investigation, and I'll owe you."
The thin man stood at the Eastern Airlines counter at Miami International and passed a stack of cash over the counter. The clerk printed out his ticket, and said, "Did you want to make your return flight arrangements now, Mr. Early?"
"No, I don't know how long I'll be staying there."
The machine whirred and spat out the ticket, which was snapped into a folder and handed over with a smile. "Boarding in fifteen minutes, Mr. Early, and thank you for flying Eastern."
The thin man walked toward the gate. He was tired. Bishop had mobilized him early in the morning, after a night spent at jai alai and drinking in Cuban after-hours places, noisy, garishly decorated rooms lit like supermarkets. He had recognized several people, from the old days, but nobody had recognized him.
James Early was just one of the four aliases he was able to adopt with the various ID papers he had stashed in his soft nylon carry-on bag. He hadn't used Bill Caballo in a dozen or more years, although people who knew him from those days usually called him Bill. It had been longer than that since he had used the name his parents had given him at birth. Had anyone shouted that name out now, as he moved slowly toward the gate, he wouldn't have looked up, or indicated by the slightest movement that he recognized it. It was not training that enabled him to do this, but a peculiarity of mind, a vagueness of the sense of identity. The thin man was like a boat. It didn't matter what name you painted on the stern; the important thing was that it floated and went where you wanted to go.
The thin man passed his ticket to the stewardess at the mouth of the jetway, and boarded flight 54 to National Airport in Washington, D.C.
TWELVE
Flickering screen, grainy image, the whir of the projector on a rickety wooden desk, four men sitting around the desk on uncomfortable straight chairs, watching people die. Three Chinese men in gray pajamas kneel before a pit, three soldiers shoot them in the back of the head. They fall forward in unison. A machine gun mounted on the back of a truck shoots down a row of naked civilians of all ages and both sexes. Nazis in Poland. Old NKVD footage: a prisoner brought into a small room, is seated on a chair, as at a concert. Behind the prisoner's head, a little door like a dumbwaiter opens: a slight puff of pale smoke and the man falls forward. Various African executions next, obscure and degrading. One famous one: the Vietnamese colonel executing the prisoner with a pistol after the Tet attacks.
"Watch this one, it's the only nonexecution," said V.T.
Wartime, a trench filled with men dressed in motley uniforms, many sporting crossbelts, bandoliers, and odd black, tasseled hats. The men scramble out of the trench and one of them, on rising above the protection of the earth, is struck in the head by a bullet. His head jerks away from the shot, a cloud of dark material seems to rise from his skull like a departing soul, the tassel on his hat bounces up, obscenely playful, and he is flung backward into the trench.
For nearly twenty minutes they watched gunshot deaths representing nearly every one of the monstrous governments and antigovernments the century has produced in such profusion. Karp, watching, wondered how the victims kept their apparent equanimity. None of them looked like they were going to the beach, but neither did they seem particularly concerned. One woman, standing in her underwear before the guns, smoothed the hair of her daughter, as if they were posing for a photograph. All the victims had but one thing in common: when the bullets struck them, they fell or jerked away from the shots, which was the point of the present show.
The film whipped out of the slot and chattered, the screen went white. V.T. clicked off the projector and switched on the lights. Karp and the two other men blinked and stretched. To break the silence, Karp said, "What, no cartoons?"
The laughter was brief and uncomfortable, and Karp was annoyed at himself for the flippancy. He looked around the room at the men. V.T. displayed his usual bland, contained exterior, although there were still those dark circles under his eyes that Karp did not recall from their years together in New York. Jim Phelps, the photo expert, appeared grim and suspicious, as he did when viewing any film that he had not personally examined with a hand lens. He tapped nervously on a pile of manila envelopes he had brought with him, as if anxious for his part of the session to begin. The fourth man, Dr. Casper Wendt, seemed most affected by the film. The coroner of a large Midwestern city, Wendt was a vociferous member of the forensic pathology panel Karp had set up. Although he had seen any number of dead bodies in his practice, he was obviously less familiar with the actual process that rendered them so, although he was also one of the great students of all the Kennedy assassination amateur films. Wendt was thin and tall with glabrous blue eyes and a prim, reserved expression. Pale and distracted now, he absently polished his glasses on his tie.
Karp now addressed him. "So, Doc, what do you make of all this?"
Wendt carefully donned his glasses and said, "Very… I'm not sure 'interesting' is the correct word. No, informative, in a hideous way. These are armed forces archival films?"
"Yeah, from Aberdeen," said Karp. "There's a group out there that studies battle wounds. They have a lot more than the ones we just saw, but I thought these might give us the idea. I guess you noticed the main point in all these shootings."
"Quite," said Wendt. "It is obvious that we do not observe in any of these events a movement in the direction from which the shot originated. Such a movement on the part of Kennedy has, of course, been noted by some observers in the Zapruder film. Nevertheless, I would hesitate to call these examples probative in the present case, as confirming that the backward movement of the president was the result of a shot from in front."
"What do you mean?" asked Karp, surprised.
"I mean only that because the actual autopsy was so badly botched, we cannot recreate the possible neuromuscular sequelae of any of the shots that struck the president. Thus we cannot absolutely exclude the possibility that the observed motion was, in fact, the result of a shot from the rear. The various theories that have been put forward, that, for example, the pressure built up by the shock of the bullet, when expelled from the front of the skull, acted as a jet, propelling the body backward, or that some odd neurological event occurred that caused the muscles of the back to contract, with the same result, can therefore not be entirely contradicted. I personally think such sequelae are unlikely, highly unlikely, but they cannot be scientifically ruled out without extensive further experimentation."
Wendt always talked like this, as if he were reading from a double-columned, small-print forensic pathology text. Karp tried to conceal his frustration, asking calmly, "What sort of experimentation? I thought the Warren Commission already did that."
"They shot a goat, with inconclusive results," said Wendt, not disguising his contempt. "Essentially, they were hoping to demonstrate that a bullet such as Warren exhibit 399, the famous magic bullet, could penetrate layers of bone and tissue and emerge as relatively unaffected as 399 was, which, if one believes the single-bullet theory, went through the president's back, emerged through his neck, went through Governor Connally's body, shattering a rib, exited his body, went through his wrist, producing a comminuted fracture of the radius, and penetrated his thigh. In this they were entirely unsuccessful, as, in my opinion, anyone is bound to be. You cannot make such wounds and end up with a bullet that looks like that."
"Yeah, right, but we're not talking about the magic bullet now. We know the magic bullet is garbage, not so much because it couldn't do the things you said, or because the shot trajectories are doubtful, but because we have no damn idea what the bullet really is. All we know about it for sure is that it was fired from Oswald's rifle. It was found on a stretcher at Parkland? What stretcher? Who found it? Who handled it? If it was pulled from Connally's body and popped into an evidence bag in the operating room, then fine, we'd have to deal with it seriously, but since it wasn't-well, I wasn't brought up to consider crap like that real evidence."
Wendt seemed taken aback at this, since he had devoted years to criticizing the magic bullet's anomalously pristine appearance. Karp continued, "No, what we're about today is the shot or shots that killed Kennedy, the head shots. Specifically, what're the possibilities of a head shot from the front?"
Wendt pursed his lips, as if loath to let a speculative remark pass through them. "As to that, I would allow the possibility of an explosive or fragmenting bullet arriving from that direction, simultaneously, or nearly simultaneously, with the shot from the rear. But since we do not have the brain correctly preserved in formalin, nor any sections that might have been made from the brain, we can never arrive at a definitive conclusion on this point."
"But you do have something to work with," Karp pressed. "I mean we do have an autopsy panel under way."
Karp had been hearing odd things from the autopsy panel. Murray Selig had been uncharacteristically oblique on the few occasions that Karp had reached him by phone, and so he had invited Wendt, the maverick, and famous for his critique of the Warren procedures, for an informal consultation to try and get some straight answers. Which, in the event, he was finding hard to extract.
A smile suggested itself on Wendt's thin lips. "Yes, assuredly, but an autopsy panel without a corpse to work on is more of a debating society than a panel of scientists. Essentially, we are limited to perusing secondhand evidence and with photographic material only, the Parkland and the autopsy photos and X rays. I have suggested, without much success, a program of-"
"The photos are faked," said Phelps, loudly and confidently. "So are the skull X rays."
He had their attention.
Without another word he pulled a packet of eight-by-ten glossies out of one of the envelopes and spread them across the desk.
"This is supposed to be the back of Kennedy's head," Phelps said, "with the entry wound of the head shot near the cowlick." He indicated a photograph of the back of the dead man's head, the hair damp and matted, a rubber-gloved hand holding it in position by a lock of hair. "This is an obvious composite forgery. You can see the matte lines where it was pieced together. That was done, of course, to hide the huge exit wound in the back of the skull."
Karp stared at the photograph while Phelps traced the supposed join with a pencil. Karp shrugged and said "Okay, let's say I take your word for it-"
"You don't have to take my word for it. I spoke to Floyd Riebe, the photographer who took the photograph at Bethesda. He said there was a huge hole in the back of Kennedy's head. The Parkland doctors said the same thing originally too. Also, look at this blowup of frame 335 of Zapruder." He dealt a color eight-by-ten from the stack. "The top of his head is obviously missing." They all stared at the blurry horror. Karp turned to Wendt. "Doc, what do you think?"
Wendt paused judiciously, then responded, "This is obviously inconsistent with the X rays we have been given."
Phelps had an answer to that too. He pulled out a positive print of an X ray and placed it next to a different glossy, the most gruesome picture yet. It showed a three-quarter right-side view of the corpse's face, with the brains bubbling up out of the skull like a party hat. "This is supposed to be a right-side lateral X ray. It shows massive damage to the right front side of the face. But no damage to that side of the face was ever described by any witness, either at Parkland or at Bethesda. And obviously, from this photograph, there's no such damage."
"Did the Warren people see this stuff?" asked V.T.
"Justice Earl Warren saw them," replied Phelps in a sneering tone. "The story is, he was so shocked by them that he refused to allow them to be made public, and they were never shown to the commission."
While they thought about this, Phelps brought out some more pictures and added them to his gallery on the wooden desk. "This is a picture of the top of the head. See this line? It's surgery. And nobody ever mentioned a surgical procedure on the top of the head. The Bethesda autopsy team said that the skull was so shattered that they were able to lift the brain out without any further cutting of the skull."
"What are you saying?" asked Karp uneasily.
"I'm saying that between Parkland and Bethesda, somebody worked on the body. They cut out the brain and modified the skull to make the single-shot-from-the-rear theory plausible." This was said with profound assurance, as if anyone with eyes could plainly see it.
Karp snapped a lidded-eye look toward V.T., who kept his face blank. It was Wendt who responded first, and with some vigor:
"There is absolutely no evidence for any such interference. None. Nor would any such alterations be feasible in the time allowed, even if we assume that the president's body was so poorly guarded that it could have been removed from its coffin on the presidential airplane and spirited away to a secret dissecting room before being delivered to Bethesda."
"What about this photograph?" snapped Phelps "There is clearly evidence of surgery and-"
"So you say," replied Wendt, "but I see a badly shattered calvarium from which nearly anything could be construed. I am not a photographic expert, of course, but I believe that interpreting autopsy photographs as to forensic content is well within my professional purview. You say the X rays and some of the prints are faked. It may well be so, but until I and the other members of the forensic pathology panel are so in
formed officially, we will continue to base our findings on them."
"What, on faked evidence?" Phelps retorted. "What's the goddamn point of that!" He addressed Karp, his eyes sparking. "This is big, damn it. This is evidence of conscious treason by a huge conspiracy involving people close to the top of the government. How else could they have-"
"Stop!" said Karp, holding up his big hand like a traffic cop. Dueling experts, the prosecutor's nightmare, and he was sick of it. "First of all," he said sharply, "treason is not a word I want to hear around this office. We're not investigating treason, we're investigating, if that's still the right word, a homicide."
"But, it's the president…," Phelps began.
"Assassinating the president is not treason," said Karp forcefully. "Even a coup is not treason. Treason shall consist in levying war against the United States and giving aid and comfort to its enemies. It's in the Constitution, the only crime defined in the Constitution. So forget treason. Conspiracy to commit murder, interfering with an investigation, tampering with and withholding evidence-that's different, and we may have found evidence of all of that. It's enough." He shot the famous stare around the table. Nobody spoke, and he resumed. "Now, as to these photos: Jim, write your report. We'll get some independent source to confirm or reject your findings and then we'll see. Dr. Wendt-I'll try to get funds for the sort of experimental testing you're interested in, if you'll give me an outline of the sort of stuff you want to do."
This speech was delivered in a tone of finality. Phelps, still bristling and muttering, shoved his photographs back into their envelopes. V.T. took him aside and spoke earnestly to him for some minutes in a low voice. Karp turned to the coroner. "Sorry about this, Doc. Things are apt to get heated around here."
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