11/22/63: A Novel

I checked, but I knew he was telling the truth as soon as I saw the other man’s name in the newspaper’s hotcha-hotcha boldface type. The harmonic echo was as loud as a guitar amp set on reverb. Local oil rajah George de Mohrenschildt and wife Jeanne lifted a glass (or maybe it was a dozen!) at the Carousel Club on Wednesday night, celebrating the scrump-tiddly-uptious lady’s birthday. How old? The lovebirds weren’t telling, but to us she doesn’t look a day over twenty-three (skidoo!). They were hosted by the Carousel’s jovial panjandrum Jack Ruby, who sent over a bottle o’ bubbly and then joined them for a toast. Happy birthday, Jeanne, and long may you wave!

“The champagne was rotgut and I had a hangover until three the next afternoon, but it was worth it if you’re satisfied.”

I was. I was also fascinated. “How well do you know this guy Ruby?”

De Mohrenschildt sniffed-all his baronial snobbery expressed in a single quick inhale through flared nostrils. “Not well, and don’t want to. He’s a crazy little Jew who buys the police free drinks so they’ll look the other way when he uses his fists. Which he likes to do. One day his temper will get him in trouble. Jeanne likes the strippers. They get her hot.” He shrugged, as if to say who could understand women. “Now are you-” He looked down, saw the gun in my fist, and stopped talking. His eyes widened. His tongue came out and licked his lips. It made a peculiar wet slupping sound as he drew it back into his mouth.

“Am I satisfied? Was that what you were going to ask?” I prodded him with the gun barrel and took considerable pleasure in his gasp. Killing changes a man, I tell you, it coarsens him, but in my defense, if there was ever a man who deserved a salutary scare, it was this one. Marguerite was partially responsible for what her youngest son had become, and there was plenty of responsibility for Lee himself-all those half-formed dreams of glory-but de Mohrenschildt had played a part. And was it some complicated plot hatched deep in the bowels of the CIA? No. Slumming simply amused him. So did the rage and disappointment baking up from the plugged oven of Lee’s disturbed personality.

“Please,” de Mohrenschildt whispered.

“I’m satisfied. But listen to me, you windbag: you’re never going to meet with Lee Oswald again. You’re never going to talk to him on the phone. You’re never going to mention a word of this conversation to his wife, to his mother, to George Bouhe, to any of the other emigres. Do you understand that?”

“Yes. Absolutely. I was growing bored with him, anyway.”

“Not half as bored as I am with you. If I find out you’ve talked to Lee, I’ll kill you. Capisce? ”

“Yes. And the leases…?”

“Someone will be in touch. Now get the fuck out of my car.”

He did so, posthaste. When he was behind the wheel of the Caddy, I reached out again with my left hand. Instead of beckoning, this time I used my index finger to point at Mercedes Street. He went.

I sat where I was a little while longer, looking at the clipping, which he in his haste had forgotten to take with him. The de Mohrenschildts and Jack Ruby, glasses raised. Was it a signpost pointing toward a conspiracy, after all? The tin-hat crew who believed in things like shooters popping up from sewers and Oswald doppelgangers probably would have thought so, but I knew better. It was just another harmonic. This was the Land of Ago, where everything echoed.

I felt I had closed Al Templeton’s window of uncertainty to the merest draft. Oswald was going to return to Dallas on the third of October. According to Al’s notes, he would get hired as a common laborer at the Texas School Book Depository in the middle of October. Except that wasn’t going to happen, because sometime between the third and the sixteenth, I was going to end his miserable, dangerous life.

5

I was allowed to spring Sadie from the hospital on the morning of August seventh. She was quiet on the ride back to Jodie. I could tell she was still in considerable pain, but she rested a companionable hand on my thigh for most of the drive. When we turned off Highway 77 at the big Denholm Lions billboard, she said: “I’m going back to school in September.”

“Sure?”

“Yes. If I could stand up in front of the whole town at the Grange, I guess I can manage it in front of a bunch of kids in the school library. Besides, I have a feeling we’re going to need the money. Unless you have some source of income I don’t know about, you’ve got to be almost broke. Thanks to me.”

“I should have some money coming in at the end of the month.”

“The fight?”

I nodded.

“Good. And I’ll only have to listen to the whispers and the giggles for a little while, anyway. Because when you go, I’m going with you.” She paused. “If it’s still what you want.”

“Sadie, it’s all I want.”