Ask Not

by Max Allan Collins

  “Sounds about right.”

  “And here’s another interesting fact—Lee Harvey Oswald was a frequent caller at Banister’s office, and apparently worked out of there when he was distributing pro-Castro leaflets on Canal Street.”

  “Sounds like typical spook stuff.”

  “As well it might. Banister’s address is in the thick of Intelligence Central here in New Orleans—offices of FBI, CIA, and Naval Intelligence, easy walking distance. Banister died the night before the Warren Commission interviewed Jack Ruby in his jail cell, by the way. What do you make of that, Mr. Heller?”

  “Why should I make anything of it?”

  He sat puffing on his pipe, leaning back, his manner casual, almost lazy, his eyes hard and alert. “You were on the rackets committee with John and Robert Kennedy.”

  “That’s right. I don’t remember that being mentioned in the Life article, though.”

  “I said I’d read about you elsewhere. So you knew Jack, and you know Bobby.”

  “I knew Jack a little. I worked for Bobby.”

  “Robert Kennedy’s made public statements backing this lone assassin conclusion. Is that what he really thinks, Mr. Heller?”

  “I can’t speak for him.”

  “Well, you might mention to him that you and I spoke, and that I would be pleased to speak with him. That I have a strong feeling that New Orleans might be the key to his brother’s murder.”

  “You do know he’s not attorney general anymore, right?”

  He nodded slowly in that irritating way wise men do.

  “I don’t think I have anything for you, Mr. Garrison. Am I free to go?”

  “Certainly, Mr. Heller. Just leave your full contact information with my secretary, so we can deal with your rental car theft properly. You know there was some slight damage to it—I hope you picked up the optional insurance.”

  “I’m covered.”

  “Pleased to hear it.”

  At the door, I paused and turned to him. “What if I said I suspected significant mob involvement in the assassination?”

  “I would not be surprised.”

  “Would it be a conflict of interest?”

  The cow eyes tightened. “I’ll choose not to take that as an insult, Mr. Heller.”

  “Fine. Then I’ll say this. Never mind Bobby. You’re in a unique position to get to bottom of this. You can subpoena people. A lot of the principal players involved hung around New Orleans. You can ask questions. You can do something.”

  He was sitting there, pulling on the pipe, rocking gently, thinking about that, when I went out.

  * * *

  Shep Shepherd had again managed the small miracle of putting an empty booth on either side of us in the VIP Room at the Chicago Playboy Club. We had enjoyed a late supper and were on to drinks, the hour approaching midnight. The CIA security chief was in a gray Brooks Brothers and I was in a gray Botany 500, the major difference being I had more color in my necktie. He was finishing up his third Gibson and I was downing my second vodka gimlet. The jazz combo was playing “What Kind of Fool Am I?”

  “There’s no way I can give you an absolute assurance,” he said, “that the Company was blameless in the Kilgore matter.”

  “Not ‘matter,’ Shep. Murder.”

  “Maybe murder,” he said with a gap-toothed smile, as inappropriate as it was boyish. “You said yourself it might have been accidental.”

  “Then where are the tapes?” I asked. “Her notes?”

  “Who knows? As for murder, do you rule out the husband?”

  “Not entirely. Frank Felton is a washed-up radio star, a failed producer, who single-handedly lost that breakfast show of theirs while Flo was away. Now he’s inherited that town house, which is already on the market for two hundred grand, plus whatever insurance money and retirement funds come in.”

  “But you don’t think he did it?”

  “No. Somebody said to me, rightly, that Felton didn’t have the balls. And I also think he still loved her.”

  His shrug accompanied a shake of the head. “Men have been known to kill women they loved. Perhaps more than any other kind. And then there’s that young reporter from Indianapolis.”

  Our Bunny stopped by, bringing a fresh round; she was a golden blonde named Connie who’d been a Playmate last year.

  “Mark Revell is no murderer,” I said. “He’s just a Midwestern kid with stars in his eyes. A nobody who likes to get next to somebodies. A fan. And basically a decent enough kid, if I read him right.”

  “So he’s off the suspect list.”

  I sipped the gimlet. “Actually, no. There’s a way he could be involved.”

  “How is that?”

  “What if he were one of your assets?”

  “My assets?”

  “Well, the Company’s. I mean, he’s a reporter for an Indiana newspaper, but he globe-hops. Rome, Paris, London. Where does he get the money? Yeah, sometimes those junkets are paid for by movie studios, but not usually for a smaller market like Indianapolis. He was in a perfect position to do minor international courier jobs for Uncle Sam.”

  “This is getting a little far-fetched, Nate. Surely you can do better.”

  “Not so far-fetched. He denies having an affair with Flo, but she made it clear to me, and others, that she was sleeping with the kid. Why would he deny it? What better result for a star fucker than fucking a star?”

  “Well, she was married.”

  “In a famously open relationship. I think the Company hired this kid to get close to her, to keep an eye on her developing Kennedy story. To seduce her, if necessary, to gain her trust. But here things get murky. What if Revell were asked to lift her assassination notes and her tapes, particularly the Ruby one? The kid worked with her, assisted her, and would know right where she kept such things.”

  “I’ll bite. Suppose he did get that assignment. How would he pull it off?”

  “With the Company’s help. Dr. Gottlieb or one of your other resident mad scientists cooks up a mickey for Revell to slip Flo, which he does at the Regency piano bar, after the TV broadcast. She gets understandably woozy and he escorts her home. She flops onto her little bed in her office, going to sleep, while her protégé filches the JFK materials. But the mickey the kid has slipped her reacts badly with the booze and the Seconal already in her system—or maybe she wakes up and takes the Seconal, that’s hard to say—and then? That’s all she wrote. Literally.”

  “Even that would be an accidental death.”

  “Yeah, I guess. A manslaughter-ish kind of accident, though. Or … maybe Gottlieb or one of his cronies had given Revell something lethal to dose her drink with, almost certainly without the kid’s knowledge. My little girl reporter had found out more on her own than the Warren Commission and all its investigators. So maybe it was decided that she had to go.”

  “She didn’t do her investigating entirely on her own.”

  “No, Mark Lane was there for some of it, but he’s already being discredited as a kook, despite his impressive credentials. But I was there, wasn’t I? Which is why you happen to be in Chicago again, so soon, isn’t it?”

  A smile flickered on the boyish face. “Not necessarily. But there is a rumor that, uh … Flo Kilgore gave you a duplicate of the Ruby tape.”

  Looked like Uncle Carlos was spreading the word.

  “Suppose she did?” I said. “What would it be worth to the Company for me not to come forward with it? To leave buried it and any copies I might have?”

  “What would that be worth?”

  The jazz combo started in on “I Wanna Be Around.”

  I said, “How about a simple assurance from those representing the country that I fought for? An assurance that my life, and my son’s life—and my ex-wife’s life, too, what the hell—are no longer on the line.”

  “… That sounds reasonable.”

  “And I’ll even throw in my own assurance that I have no intention of taking the assassination investigation any
further. I was only sniffing around the edges, after all. I never even met Billie Sol Estes, let alone LBJ.”

  But others would pick up those threads. And I would in fact share what I’d discovered with Bobby Kennedy. Then there were the dozen signed statements in a dozen safety-deposit boxes scattered around the country, detailing that Jack Ruby interview, my substitute for the imaginary duplicate tapes with which I’d threatened Marcello.

  “Of course,” Shep said lightly, “this is all hypothetical.”

  “Of course.”

  “Hypothetically speaking, you would have a deal. Would you like to shake hands on it?”

  “I don’t think so. I’ll also pass on signing anything in blood, if you don’t mind.” I slid out of the booth. I leaned in like a Bunny doing her trademark dip. “Don’t contact me again, old buddy. We’re done, you and I. I wish you and your family and Uncle Sam well. But we are done.”

  “All right, Nate. Consider yourself off the Christmas card list.”

  I straightened and nodded and was about to go when I felt his hand on my sleeve.

  “One thing, Nate,” he said, giving me that Bobby Morse smile. “Be aware that the Company is very grateful to you for your service in New Orleans.”

  “What service is that?”

  “Why, tying off any number of inconvenient loose ends for us.… Oh, and I’ll get the check.”

  * * *

  The Warren Commission’s final 889-page report was submitted to President Lyndon Baines Johnson on September 24, 1964, concluding that Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone in killing President John F. Kennedy (and wounding Texas governor John Connally). It also found that Jack Ruby acted alone killing Oswald.

  Bobby Kennedy nearly lost his Senate bid, his grief and general disengagement in the process costing him dearly. But late in September, his opponent—the normally likable Senator Kenneth Keating—made a bid for the Jewish vote by accusing Bobby of settling a World War II–era case in favor of a company with Nazi ties. Supposedly RFK had done this just to please old Joe Kennedy, whose reputation as a Nazi appeaser still haunted the family. The charge infuriated Bobby, who before had considered Keating benign, and he struck back hard—he had lost one brother to a war, he reminded voters, and another to an assassin’s bullet. It energized his campaign. He won in a landslide, and his path to the presidency seemed clear.

  On October 5, 1966, Jack Ruby’s conviction was overturned on technicalities and his death sentence set aside. Around this time, Ruby complained that a “mysterious visiting physician” had given him a series of injections; he also claimed to have received numerous chest X-rays, one lasting upwards of an hour. He succumbed to lung cancer on January 3, 1967, at Parkland Hospital, where both Jack Kennedy and Lee Oswald had died.

  While I apparently removed one “cleanup crew,” assassination witnesses continued to occasionally meet premature fates over the next few years. Albert Bogard, the car salesman who gave the Oswald look-alike a test-drive, committed suicide, in February 1966. Lee Bowers, the railroad towerman who saw unusual activity behind the Grassy Knoll fence, perished in a suspicious single-car accident, in August 1966. But most of those Flo and I interviewed survived—S. M. Holland, Mary Woodward, J. C. Price, among others. Witnesses who waited years, or in some cases decades, to come forward fared better.

  Madeleine Brown did not go public about her long relationship with LBJ until 1997, revealing that her son Steven was sired by the late president. Steven, whose physical resemblance to his famous father was striking, filed a $10.5 million lawsuit against Lady Bird, Johnson’s widow; but Steven died of cancer before the case was settled. Madeleine wrote a tell-all book that combined rapturous descriptions of lovemaking with Lyndon with revelations about her lover’s cold-blooded role in the assassination, but the book did not receive widespread distribution or attention.

  In 1970, Beverly Oliver came forward as the so-called “Babushka Lady” evident in photos and films of the Dealey Plaza tragedy, and published a memoir in 1994 that also received little attention. The 8 mm film she shot has never been found, though the House Assassinations Committee made the attempt.

  Jim Garrison’s investigation into the Kennedy assassination remains a source of controversy—Bobby Kennedy, initially supportive, later came to call the larger-than-life prosecutor a fraud. Bobby’s reaction did not surprise me—Garrison’s primary line of inquiry was CIA involvement, which might have brought Operation Mongoose to light, tarnishing JFK’s memory and RFK’s political future.

  Garrison might have convicted David Ferrie as a JFK assassination conspirator, had the pederast pilot not died a mysterious suicide himself in 1967, leaving two unsigned notes (cause of death: a supposed brain hemorrhage). The crusading DA had to settle for tangential figure Clay Shaw, New Orleans business executive, who was acquitted in 1969, after the only criminal trial to grow out of the assassination to date. Notably, Garrison used his subpoena power to show the Zapruder film in public for the first time. His investigation inspired director Oliver Stone’s 1991 film JFK, which fictionalized Garrison much as The Untouchables television series and movie did Eliot Ness. But Stone’s film, as controversial as Garrison himself, led to the passage of the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act of 1992 (the year of Garrison’s death) and the formation of the US Assassination Records Review Board, making available to the public previously classified documents.

  The groundbreaking work of Flo Kilgore and Mark Lane opened a floodgate of conspiracy research and theorizing, with a conspiracy cottage industry rising up to produce hundreds of books on the assassination, ranging from the ridiculous to the sublime. Defenders of the Warren Commission Report did their best to trivialize all such researchers into “conspiracy nuts,” much like Lee Harvey Oswald himself had been deemed a crank with a gun. Even before Oliver Stone, however, the public remained largely skeptical of the Warren Commission.

  In the wake of Watergate, and with the Zapruder film in wider circulation, the Gallup Poll reported that 81 percent of the American public considered the JFK assassination the result of a conspiracy. The House Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) was established in 1976 to investigate the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr., and the shooting of Alabama governor George Wallace. The Committee issued its final report in 1978, concluding that a conspiracy was responsible for the assassination of JFK.

  The two-year span of the House investigation sparked another round of witness deaths, some mysterious, others blatant.

  Roger Craig, the former Dallas County sheriff deputy, continued to speak out about what he’d witnessed surrounding the assassination. Returning from a meeting with Jim Garrison, Craig was shot at, his head grazed. His car was forced off the road in 1973, resulting in a debilitating back injury that ended his law-enforcement career. In 1974, Craig answered a knock at his door and was struck by a shotgun blast, wounding his shoulder. In 1975, he died of a rifle wound in his father’s home, a supposed suicide at thirty-nine.

  A key Oswald associate, George De Mohrenschildt, was being sought by the House for testimony when he presumably blew off his own head with a shotgun, a shooting termed “very strange” by the Palm County, Florida, sheriff’s office.

  Mobsters called to testify at the House Assassination hearings had a particularly tough go of it. In 1975, Sam Giancana, while frying up peppers and sausages at home, was shot six times in the back of the head with a .22 automatic, and several more in the mouth—a mob message that a squealer had been silenced. In 1976, Johnny Rosselli turned up in an oil drum in a bay near Miami, strangled, shot, and dismembered. In 1977, Chuckie Nicoletti, sitting in his car in a suburban Chicago restaurant parking lot, was shot in the head three times, gangland-style, and the vehicle set afire.

  No such abrupt fate awaited Carlos Marcello. While serving the last of several prison sentences, he suffered a series of strokes, became seriously disabled, and began showing signs of dementia. He lost the power of speech and any sense
of who he was, finally reverting to infancy, dying in 1993.

  Clint Peoples, promoted to Senior Captain in 1969, left the Rangers in 1974 and became US Marshal for the Northern District of Texas. Even after retiring, he continued to investigate Henry Marshall’s murder, pressuring an imprisoned Billie Sol Estes to set the record straight. In 1983, a recently released Estes appeared before a grand jury and testified that LBJ has sent Mac Wallace to dispose of whistle-blower Marshall. With both Johnson and Wallace deceased—and the reputation of a US President to consider—the jury did not act upon these accusations; but they did officially change Henry Marshall’s suicide to death by gunshot. Peoples, working to prove Mac Wallace’s role in the assassination, died in an automobile accident in 1992, although his last words indicated he’d been run off the road.

  In January 1971, Frank Felton was found dead in the same bed where his wife Flo had been found. At first called a heart attack, the death was deemed an intentional drug overdose—a real suicide in a case riddled with fake ones.

  Mark Revell continued as the entertainment writer on the Indianapolis News into the early 1980s. He went on to work as a photographer of art studies, later receiving a master’s degree in Christian Counseling from Jerry Falwell’s Liberty University.

  I saw Janet Adams a number of times in Chicago over the next ten years, though Jada’s Carousel fame soon faded, just as her extreme sexpot style receded in the popular culture. We were never really an item but had a great time whenever we got together, though I was never tempted to become her fifth or sixth husband, or whatever number was next. She died in 1980, and some have made her death out as another mysterious one. It wasn’t. Riding a motorcycle, she turned in front of a school bus, which was unable to stop. Nothing mysterious about that, just sad as hell.

  LBJ stepped down from the presidency, a man defeated by Vietnam and the dire popularity polls it engendered. He seemed to be making way for Bobby Kennedy’s candidacy. It’s just possible Bobby had something on Lyndon that helped the President make that tough call. Undoubtedly Jack Kennedy’s successor did some great things, but he was also a political animal capable of doing anything for power. Fighting depression, in poor health after severe heart problems, he died in 1973, two days after his second term would have ended.