11/22/63

I read and reread Al’s Oswald stuff, too. Finally I recognized this for the obsessive behavior it was, and put the notebook in the lockbox with my “morning manuscript.” I have called those notes exhaustive, and so they seemed to me then, but as time — the conveyor belt on which we all must ride — brought me closer and closer to the point where my life might converge with that of the young assassin-to-be, they began to seem less so. There were holes.

Sometimes I cursed Al for forcing me into this mission willy-nilly, but in more clearheaded moments, I realized that extra time wouldn’t have made any difference. It might have made things worse, and Al probably knew it. Even if he hadn’t committed suicide, I would only have had a week or two, and how many books have been written about the chain of events leading up to that day in Dallas? A hundred? Three hundred? Probably closer to a thousand. Some agreeing with Al’s belief that Oswald acted alone, some claiming he’d been part of an elaborate conspiracy, some stating with utter certainty that he hadn’t pulled the trigger at all and was exactly what he called himself after his arrest, a patsy. By committing suicide, Al had taken away the scholar’s greatest weakness: calling hesitation research.

3

I made occasional trips to Tampa, where discreet questioning led me to a bookmaker named Eduardo Gutierrez. Once he was sure I wasn’t a cop, he was delighted to take my action. I first bet the Minneapolis Lakers to beat the Celtics in the ’59 championship series, thereby establishing my bona fides as a sucker; the Lakers didn’t win a single game. I also bet four hundred on the Canadians to beat the Maple Leafs in the Stanley Cup Series, and won… but that was even money. Chump change, cuz, my pal Chaz Frati would have said.

My single large strike came in the spring of 1960, when I bet on Venetian Way to beat Bally Ache, the heavy favorite in the Kentucky Derby. Gutierrez said he’d give me four-to-one on a gee, five-to-one on a double gee. I went for the double after making the appropriate noises of hesitation, and came away ten thousand richer. He paid off with Frati-esque good cheer, but there was a steely glint in his eyes that I didn’t care for.

Gutierrez was a Cubano who probably didn’t weigh one-forty soaking wet, but he was also an expat from the New Orleans Mob, run in those days by a bad boy named Carlos Marcello. I got this bit of gossip in the billiard parlor next to the barbershop where Gutierrez ran his book (and an apparently never-ending backroom poker game under a photograph of a barely clad Diana Dors). The man with whom I’d been playing nineball leaned forward, looked around to make sure we had the corner table to ourselves, then murmured, “You know what they say about the Mob, George — once in, never out.”

I would have liked to have spoken to Gutierrez about his years in New Orleans, but I didn’t think it would be wise to be too curious, especially after my big Derby payday. If I had dared — and if I could have thought of a plausible way to raise the subject — I would have asked Gutierrez if he’d ever been acquainted with another reputed member of the Marcello organization, an ex-pug named Charles “Dutz” Murret. I somehow think the answer would have been yes, because the past harmonizes with itself. Dutz Murret’s wife was Marguerite Oswald’s sister. Which made him Lee Harvey Oswald’s uncle.

4

One day in the spring of 1959 (there is spring in Florida; the natives told me it sometimes lasts as long as a week), I opened my mailbox and discovered a call-card from the Nokomis Public Library. I had reserved a copy of The Disenchanted, the new Budd Schulberg novel, and it had just come in. I jumped in my Sunliner — no better car for what was then becoming known as the Sun Coast — and drove up to get it.

On my way out, I noticed a new poster on the cluttered bulletin board in the foyer. It would have been hard to miss; it was bright blue and featured a shivering cartoon man who was looking at an oversized thermometer where the mercury was registering ten below zero. GOT A DEGREE PROBLEM? the poster demanded. YOU MAY BE ELIGIBLE FOR A MAIL-ORDER CERTIFICATE FROM UNITED COLLEGE OF OKLAHOMA! WRITE FOR DETAILS!

United College of Oklahoma sounded fishier than a mackerel stew, but it gave me an idea. Mostly because I was bored. Oswald was still in the Marines, and wouldn’t be discharged until September, when he would head for Russia. His first move would be an effort to renounce his American citizenship. He wouldn’t succeed, but after a showy — and probably bogus — suicide attempt in a Moscow hotel, the Russians were going to let him stay in their country. “On approval,” so to speak. He’d be there for thirty months or so, working at a radio factory in Minsk. And at a party he would meet a girl named Marina Prusakova. Red dress, white slippers, Al had written in his notes. Pretty. Dressed for dancing.