The Sixteenth Man

by Thomas B. Sawyer

  This was not a familiar role for Santo DiMartini. He struggled to maintain his composure. “Yes.”

  Guinea prick’s good. Not so much as a sigh.

  “Okay. I’ve got people watching the airport, I’ve got my ass covered. Just do the way I say and everybody’s gonna come outa this intact. You, your daughter and me, capiche? Good night---”

  “Hold it! I can’t get my hands on that much cash by---”

  “Bullshit. Tomorrow afternoon I phone Miss Gruber at the Ocala, she better be there in the flesh – not you, her – with the bucks, and everything else the way I said – including if any of my people see your face anywhere near here – or I’ll see you on all the newsstands. Ciao.”

  Charlie pulled the hook down, hung up the handset. He could see his breath. But his armpits were soaked.

  Santo DiMartini seethed. He stabbed his cigar into the Steuben ashtray. “That – is a fucking dead man.”

  TWENTY-ONE

  Present Time

  Wednesday

  The actuality, the enormity of it, was something else. Packard’s vague, unarticulated hunch that there might have been a link between Charlie Callan and the murder of John F. Kennedy had not prepared him for the photographs. Both he and Kate Norris were stunned by the 8x10’s and contact sheets the PI had sent to Dorothy Purviance back in 1963.

  But beyond the photos’ awesome implications – beyond the question of who Lee Harvey Oswald’s three companions were – they raised new ones about Callan – and about Ms. Purviance.

  The $195,000. Was it Callan’s fee for his part in the killing of the President? If it was Callan who took the pictures, were they a record, a method of self-protection, documenting his co-conspirators? Or did he snap them accidentally? Was Dorothy’s identification of the pair in the background as Marjorie Brodax-and-boyfriend accurate, or meant to mislead, or simply her way of avoiding the truth about the man she loved? On the other hand, there was Dorothy’s claim that Marjorie had returned to Reno on the day of the JFK assassination, pretty much confirming that the photos were taken prior to November 21st or earlier. Which still didn’t eliminate the possibility of his involvement in Dallas. Ultimately, however, Callan’s innocence mattered only to the two women. For Packard, overriding all of it was a single, simple, increasingly undeniable fact: because he had unearthed Callan’s remains, Meg Brady was dead. He wanted to know why. Needed to know – to ensure if he could that whoever killed her would be punished – though even that would never rid him of all his guilt.

  Kate indicated the photos. “He must have shown these to the FBI.”

  Dorothy shook her head emphatically. “I doubt it.”

  Kate became defensive. “Why wouldn’t he?”

  “What about you?” Packard leveled at Dorothy.

  “Forget it.”

  Kate was momentarily lost, looked at one, then the other.

  Packard placed a hand on Kate’s. Then, to Dorothy: “Did you ever make copies?”

  Dorothy shook her head. “I took one look and put ‘em away. Oh, I thought about it for maybe a minute, along with maybe putting a match to them. But I figured no matter who I sent ‘em to, even if I did it anonymously, they’d find me. Fingerprints, something. They can find anyone if they want to, even more nowadays.” She reflected, then smiled at Kate. “Probably what kept me alive, listening to your grandfather. He never trusted those people as far as he could throw ‘em. I mean, the horror-stories Charlie used to tell me – about the things J. Edgar Hoover did – he was the head of the FBI back then – like that it was really his personal Secret Police. Basically – I was scared clear out of my wits.”

  Packard had read of the dirt Hoover collected on activists and others the Director deemed worthy of potential extortion, the vicious quasi-legal power he wielded.

  Dorothy continued: “I don’t know – it just – one day it suddenly totaled up. The pictures, Ruby kills Oswald, the other deaths, the money, Charlie disappears, people looking for him. And I was outa there. Been on the road ever since. Oh, I’d take a job once in a while, low-profile stuff, bookkeeping, like that. I was always good with numbers. And, between that and the cash, I’ve gotten by okay. Still got some left.”

  Kate asked, tentatively, “Did – did you ever find out where it came from – the money?”

  “No. And I admit I’ve tried not to think about it too much. But I’m pretty sure he didn’t steal it - like from a bank or anything, if that’s what you mean. Like I said, that wasn’t Charlie, any more than murder was. Besides when the Reno papers reported him missing, there was no mention of anything like that. Oh – and I scoured the Moab newspaper from when he was there. No robberies...” She poured herself another glass of wine, took a swallow. “...Anyway, as more time passed, I kept seeing where people were dying violently, ones who were in Dallas, all that stuff. And then the Warren Commission Report – that really convinced me Charlie had the right idea, that you couldn’t trust the government. I mean most people believed it was a put-up job, there were witnesses claiming they saw other shooters, heard other gunshots – and there I am with the pictures that prove it – and they’re still selling the lone gunman. Anyone who disagrees, calling ‘em ‘conspiracy freaks.’ It was pretty obvious a lot of people wanted to make sure the truth never came out.” Dorothy idly stroked Pekoe, who was now purring: “Over the years from time to time I’d think about destroying ‘em – the pictures – but – I guess it was because they were like – like my last link with Charlie...” She seemed to drift into her memories once more.

  Packard thought about the decades, her nomadic existence.

  Then, as if she was reading his mind, she gestured at her surroundings: “This – it got old a long time ago. Hell, I’ve been in hiding for way more than half my life... Anyway, when I heard you found those bones, the first thing I thought of was – it’s gotta be Charlie. And if it was, people would start coming out of the woodwork – the same kind that showed up in Reno – and you’d be their first target.”

  Ripples. Starting all the way back in Dealey Plaza.

  The camper’s interior had gotten stuffy. Dorothy reached up, opened the roof-vent. The faint mix of TV and music sounds returned. “Then I figured – finally, there might be a chance to nail the sons of bitches that took him away from me. Except when I pulled into Borrego Junction, when I saw them watching your place, I got cold feet. I was all set to bail out, to get back on the road, but then...” She looked at Kate. “...then you showed up on his doorstep---”

  Kate cut in: “You knew it was me?”

  “I guessed. Then, ten minutes on the web at that all-night Kinko’s by the campus – plus a few dollars on my credit card for tracing your plate number, and I was looking at your name, vitals, your driver’s license photo.”

  Kate grinned admiringly. As did Packard.

  Dorothy smiled. “So I figured if you were willing to go for it, I should share what I had. That’s how come we’re all here.” She waited, then: “You look like your mother. Just as pretty.”

  Packard’s mind was tripping. “Dorothy, the package he sent you – what else was in it?

  “Nothing...” She indicated the photos. “...Just those, the letter – and the money.”

  Something about Dorothy’s posture, her phrasing, told Packard there was more, but she wanted him to figure it out for himself. It fleetingly put him back in the fourth grade, his teacher as impatient as he was unnerved, frustrated, by his inability to come up with an answer that should have been obvious. He played it back. What the knife-wielder was looking for. It had to be small. Flat enough to fit in the Jeep’s sun-visor? Maybe, maybe not... And suddenly there it was.

  “The negatives. He didn’t send you the negatives.”

  Dorothy Purviance shrugged. “It would explain a lot, wouldn’t it? And you didn’t find them, right?”

  Packard and Kate were suddenly animated, their words running together.

  “Like omygod my grandmother my great-grandmother li
ke why they came after my mother and stepfather they thought she might have them.”

  “And it took them that long to track her down or they would’ve done it sooner.” Packard slowed, tapped one of the contact sheets with his forefinger. “Okay, but – how? How did they know of the pictures’ existence...? Because – because Charlie let them know – let them have a look?” He paused. Nobody in the little space moved.

  Then Kate spoke. “Good god. The cash. He – he blackmailed them?”

  “Something like that. Only – they never got the negatives...” Packard glanced at Dorothy, looking for a reaction, got the impression she was pleased that he and Kate were finally catching up to her. He continued: “...Because he disappeared with them. Or that’s what they think.”

  Astonishing. A nondescript Reno detective pulls a – what do they call it – a shakedown – on the people who killed the President? Christ, ‘outrageous’ doesn’t come close.

  Dorothy stroked an ecstatic Pekoe. “Thing is – film? All this time, out in the elements?”

  Packard stared at the photos. Contact sheets. Blowups. Long lenses. 35 millimeter. Callan knew his way around photography, darkrooms... “Wait a minute. If they were rolled up---”

  Kate jumped in: “In one of those little canisters, youknow, airtight...?”

  Packard nodded. It was possible. Assuming Charlie had had them with him up there in the canyon.

  Kate spoke hesitantly. “So – what do we do?”

  He was deep into his head, wrestling the same question. How could what they now knew be parlayed into catching the bastards that killed Meg...? He wondered what the chances were that any of the three men with Oswald could be identified at this distance in time. Slim-to-none, he guessed, all of them probably long-dead. The businessman-type could have been anyone, as could the other two riflemen, one of whom carried perhaps the only distinguishing feature of the lot. Heavy-set, with graying temples, he had what appeared to be a tattoo on his left forearm. Possibly a scorpion. Hardly a significant clue, especially now.

  Dorothy was not optimistic. “Truth is, even now I don’t know if there’s anybody you could go to with those to that wouldn’t get you killed. Or if you were to send ‘em anywhere anonymously, that they wouldn’t just sit on ‘em till they found you. And then kill you.” Then she added: “Can you believe we’ve come to a place where I can say that – and nobody gives me an argument?”

  Kate leaned her chin in her hands. “Too bad we can’t just put them on a billboard, where everybody’d see them and those people couldn’t do anything to---”

  Dorothy and Packard stared at her. The only sound in the little room was Pekoe, quacking.

  * * * * * *

  The scruffy, paunchy old man hunched over in his chair, squinted through smudged, scratched reading glasses. By pressing his wrists against his thighs and gripping the letter with both tremulous hands, he was able to hold it still enough to read the familiar, elegant, handwriting. As he had each night since last Thursday, when Arletta had brought it from town along with his weekly supplies.

  The old man loved the writer’s way with words, never begrudged his education, prosperity, the family he’d raised. God knew who deserved such things. The writer, on the other hand, would probably be very unhappy had he known that the scruffy man saved his letters. They were stacked in and around the old wooden orange-crate under the bed, tied in bundles of fifty-two. There were a lot of them.

  He reached for the bottle of Wild Turkey, tilted it, braced the neck against the lip of the jam-jar, poured till it was again half-full. Then he took a long drink. The nightwind sweeping the Sierrita Mountains rattled the windows, the door, sometimes even the roof-beams of the little two-room cabin. Tonight it was stronger than usual, causing the lights to falter, billowing an occasional downdraft of smoke out of the stone fireplace’s dying flames.

  He noticed that Red, his ancient Labrador had, without raising her head from her front paws, opened her rheumy eyes. The best Red could manage, her equivalent of a watchdog’s suspicious, animated bark. It was a few moments before the man understood: the repeated sound from the door wasn’t the wind. It was someone knocking. Red closed her eyes.

  “Yeah.”

  He placed the jam-jar next to the bottle on the shaky little table beside his chair, rose slowly on worn-out hips, painfully scuffled to the door, the letter still clutched in his left hand. Over the tops of his glasses he saw that his visitor was average height, wearing a tan topcoat over a dark business suit. In his left hand was a leather briefcase. Nothing about him was remarkable. “Yeah?”

  The visitor pointed to the scruffy, elderly man’s left arm. “Pull up your sleeve. That one.”

  “Why?”

  The man, whose name was McManus, spoke without impatience, only a calm, quiet authority – and a touch of weary resignation. As if he needed to get through this with a minimum of fuss so that he might get on with his life. “Do it, all right?”

  The older man shrugged, pulled up the sleeve of his worn, faded sweatshirt, exposing the tattoo on his forearm.

  “Thank you.” Unhurriedly, McManus reached inside his coat, pulled a large, silenced pistol from his waistband. Without raising the weapon from belt-level, he pointed it upward. The scruffy old man started to speak, but his words never got much further than his voice-box. They were stopped by the bullet that entered the underside of his jaw, exited the top of his head, splattering pieces of his brain and bone-matter onto the exposed roof rafters. The impact propelled the old man upward an inch or two off his feet, before he fell backward into the room.

  Red stirred, slowly rose, padded to his master’s side, sniffed, licked his face, then began to whimper. The old dog sat, looked inquiringly at the stranger, who returned the pistol to his belt, stepped across the threshold, quickly surveyed the interior, its rude furnishings, the few books and periodicals, the ship models. The effluvia of an isolated, oddly-spent life. He stooped, picked up the sheet of paper that had fluttered from the old man’s hand. He scanned the formal script, moved to the flourished signature: As ever, your brother, Alex.

  McManus crumpled the letter, tossed it aside. From the briefcase he withdrew a plastic squeeze bottle, flicked the cap, squirted the rug, chair cushions, the scruffy man’s corpse, then moved backward, leaving a wet trail of the stuff along the bare, worn floorboards. When he reached the still-open door, he snapped the cap closed, put the bottle back in his briefcase. From his pocket he produced a cigarette lighter, ignited it. As he stepped out onto the gravel path, he squatted, reached inside, touched the flame to the liquid residue. It began to burn, low, blue, traveling toward the old man’s body. McManus stood, pulled the door shut. He crossed the dark, barren ground, climbed into his rented Explorer. A quarter-mile down, at the end of the crude, rarely-traveled trail, he shifted out of 4-wheel drive, turned onto the County Road, toward the faint glow of Tucson to the northeast. And looked back. The isolated little desert-dry cabin was engulfed in wind-driven fire.

  TWENTY-TWO

  1963

  Tuesday, November 26th

  “No fucking way, then. I’m going to bed.” Nicole DiMartini started for the door.

  “Nikki. Please. Please...” They were the first supplicating words her father had spoken. It was not easy for him.

  She turned, faced him silently, challenging.

  DiMartini was edgy, exhausted. He had sat up all night in his study – dozing intermittently – waiting for her to return. He sighed. “All right. It’s about the Vegas casino. One of our people skimmed. Our partners, understandably, they want it back. That’s all there is to it.”

  “Uh-huh. So what do you need me for? Why not Johnny? Or Alex? Or you?”

  “They – they have some crazy idea that my people might not behave like gentlemen.”

  “You mean like, your people might kill their people.”

  DiMartini responded wearily. “Your father does not operate that way. They demanded that you handle it. I agreed. Reluctan
tly.”

  “Why do I think this sounds like total horseshit?”

  When Nicole finally returned to Humble House, a little after 5:30 AM, her father angrily demanded to know what she’d been doing all night. A mistake in any case, but given what he was about to ask of her, seriously counterproductive. Not only did Nicole let him know that her activities were none of his goddam business, that she was insulted by being treated like a child, she defiantly refused to go to Utah unless her father told her – truthfully – what it was about, why she must waste the few days she had off over Thanksgiving.

  “Jesus Christ, Daddy, what is it you’ve done now? I’m not playing bag-lady for you if you don’t tell me.”

  It distressed DiMartini that she was familiar with such terms, that she knew as much as she did about his affairs, though he understood how unrealistic had been his hope of sheltering her from the life. When she first questioned him about his business, in the wake of the hearings, he tried to convince her that things were not nearly as sinister as that little shit Bobby Kennedy painted them. However, he cautioned, if she were privy she would be in danger from those people who might wish to use her to get to her father. She defiantly asked whether he meant other hoodlums, or Federal Prosecutors. Her zinger cut deepest; she added that she wasn’t stupid, she’d known he was a mobster since she was twelve years old. And been ashamed.

  DiMartini took another run at it. “For godsake, do you think I want to expose you to any of this? I don’t – have – a choice.”

  “Yeah, you do. Tell me...”

  It wasn’t that he had any difficulty lying to his daughter. Quite the contrary. “I love you, happy birthday, you look beautiful,” and the like were virtually the only honest words he had ever spoken to her.