If Oswald went through photo albums of known agents in order to ID his mysterious mentor, he’d come up with nothing, for in truth I looked far more like Dave Guard of the Kingston Trio than I did Vassily Psycholosky, KGB killer and goon.
If all went well, there would be no physical evidence – no fingerprints, no footprints, no jimmied locks, nothing slightly out of the ordinary, nothing ambiguous in meaning; the clincher would be the ballistics, which, as I have explained, would suggest his rifle and his rifle alone.
As I drove away, he receded into the shadows. I would see him only one more time – the closest our plot would come to discovery. I quickly headed downtown to the Adolphus, where I still had to talk to Jimmy, to convince him, and where we had a great deal of planning to do.
- - - -
When I got back to the hotel, I was not surprised to see Jimmy waiting for me in the lobby.
“Hi, Mr. Meachum,” he said, rising, smiling in that Irish way, “how about letting me buy you a drink.”
“Sure,” I said, and like two cronies from an Oklahoma vacuum-cleaner manufacturer, we trundled off to the dark Men’s Bar, not the Adolphus’s famous Century Room, where a Rosemary or a Gigi or a Maryanne was singing. We found a table well away from the few other drinkers left, ordered up our poison, and waited for the girl to bring it and then to depart. For the record, in those days Texas had insane drinking laws, and we’d had to “join” the club in order to receive our own private bottles.
“So, Jimmy,” I said, “I’ve been trying to reach you. Have you spoken to Lon yet?”
“No, I haven’t. I thought I’d let the two of you work things out between you today. It seemed like a good time to take a little break.”
“Actually, it was. From what you’re saying, I guess you’ve figured it all out. That I want to change the nature but not the purpose of the mission. Same operational principles, different target. Lon, to be fair, is not so sure. He didn’t sign up for what I’m proposing. Neither did you. Neither, come to think of it, did I. But it’s here, it won’t go away; I believe it can be done. I also believe it should be done. It’s really just a continuation of the original idea. Do you want the full nine-ninety-five sales pitch or the bargain-basement four-ninety-five version? It’s getting late and I haven’t eaten yet, so I suppose the five-buck version will have to do.”
“Mr. Meachum, you don’t have to break a sweat. I get it. If you say it needs doing, then I’m the one to do it. Loyalty. You boys in your outfit, you got me out of prison and got me a new life doing what I do best and doing some good in the world. Never thought I’d have a shot at a house in the suburbs and two boys in private school, which is what I have today. I’ll sail with you to hell or the edge of the world, whichever comes first.”
“You’re a good man, Jimmy.”
“Plus, I hate them Castle Irish. Always putting on the airs, always carrying on like they weren’t bog-slogging peat burners like the rest of us. My father hated them, his father before him hated ’em more than the English. You’re doing me old dad a favor, and he’s smiling in heaven.”
“You’re a great man, Jimmy. Knowing I have you along means I know we can do this thing.”
“That we can. Do you know what I did today?”
“Of course not.”
“I was all over a joint called the Dal-Tex Building. ‘Dal-Tex,’ know what that stands for?”
“Dallas, Texas?”
“Dallas Textiles. It’s the heart of what passes as the garment trade in Dallas. Office building, a warren of offices, you’ll find fifty of ’em in every city in America. Full of rooms with desks and telephones and secretaries. What else do you need to make a buck in America? That and a good case of business smarts. This one is worth exploring because it’s located behind the Texas Book Depository on Elm Street. It has at least twenty offices that give a good look down Elm Street from almost the same angle as the Book Depository.”
“You’re way ahead of me, Jimmy.”
“You know me. I’ve got a natural talent for mischief of all sorts. There’s a fair number of buildings on the plaza that would give Mr. Scott an angle, but the only one that’s a few degrees off from the Book Depository is the Dal-Tex Building. I don’t see where else we could run the operation from without running the risk – too big, in my mind – of leaving an obvious clue that some other birds, that is, us, were involved. They’re going to investigate this one up the ass, with all the national experts and the best techs the Bureau has. If anything’s wrong, they’ll sniff it out. Something you never heard of, like arterial spray pattern or skin stretch marks or powder dispersal pattern or something subatomic that not even Dick Tracy has thought of. We have to minimize everything that differentiates our shooter from the little red nuthead. It’s a much higher threshold than with General Walker. That’s what makes it a puzzle and, frankly, for this boyo, great fun. I love to match wits with the best, that’s for sure.”
“Glad you’re so excited,” I said.
“We have to get in and out of that building, find a shooting position, all within a few minutes, and over the last part, it’ll be screaming and panic. It’s no easy thing.”
“I suppose it’s too late to rent an office. We don’t know if one’s available, but it would attract a great deal of attention if we contacted the management and put down a deposit tomorrow.”
“No, they’d tumble to that right away.”
“Are there any bathrooms or deserted offices where we might set up?”
“No bathrooms, boss. They always put bathrooms on the interior side of the corridor, because they get more rental dough for a window. One or two of the offices I saw looked empty, but there’s no way of telling how they’ll be the day after tomorrow. It’s a tough one.”
“We’re two bright boys. And I see a gleam in your eye. I think you’ve already found a way.”
“That I have, boss,” he said with his total-mischief smile.
And then he told me his plan.
CHAPTER 17
Marion Adams, gun expert and official lounge lizard to the monied collector set, had an insidious charm. It was easy to see that he was one of those gifted enablers who helps the big tall rich get what they think they want with a minimum of fuss. He was tall, fair, rather flitty, serious only about himself, hiding behind square black glasses and a suit so dowdy that it had to be expensive. He could have been an embalmer, and in a sense he was, masterminding the transfers of dead guns soaked in formaldehyde for a profit.
He insisted on high end all the way, no casual tamale and beer joint for him, and so the three men met in the French Room at the Adolphus, a Texas fantasy of high Louis XV dining, where every item on the menu boasted its own apostrophe and some two or three.
Marty, as he was called by all who knew and could afford him, held the floor, as he always did. It was the divine right of blowhards. It turned out he knew a great deal about apostrophes, French dishes, wines, art, politics, just about everything, and even Richard yielded to the torrent of knowledge; meanwhile, Swagger picked at the morsels of overprepared food, wished he’d ordered the chicken, and worked at keeping a look of polite interest on his face. Finally, Marty turned to business, over coffee.
“I am not a conspiracy ‘nut,’” he said. “In fact, like millions of others, I accepted without question the Warren Commission report and was willing to let it go at that. But I do make my living telling gun stories. I was born into the business, really at its high-water mark. My father was a manufacturer and his father before him. Connecticut gun people. I had the gene too, but from a slightly different angle. I had the hunger to know and chronicle, not manufacture, not shoot, not hunt. I’m the amanuensis of the American gun culture. I’ve written books on all the major manufacturers, I consult at the country’s finest auction houses, I am a registered appraiser in thirty-nine states, and I advise many of the nation’s most distinguished collectors on the guns they are about to purchase. I assume you have checked my background and found
it satisfactory.”
“Nobody has a discouraging word about you, Mr. Adams,” said Swagger.
“Nor you, Mr. Brophy. I’ve checked too. You seem to be a man who’s handled crises all over the world.”
“I seem to have come out okay. I am a lucky son of a gun.”
“May I ask you, respectfully, for a brief account of your life?”
“Sure,” said Swagger, launching easily into a colorful spin on the mining engineer’s life, the risks, the near-misses, and the long nights alone with books.
He finished on Brophy’s fictional JFK obsession. “Some years ago, I got hooked on JFK’s death. More I read, more I questioned. Read some conspiracy crap and was not impressed. Read Warren, and it seemed ragged. Started thinking hard about it, using my engineer’s brain. Realized a couple of years ago, I had enough money to last several lifetimes and two or three more wives, so I decided I was tired of sleeping bags and would prefer to spend the rest of my life going into this thing in eighth gear and seeing where it would take me. Always loved guns, so that was a start, and I guess ’cause I’m mechanical by nature, my approach has always been through the guns. Interesting. Somehow I came up with some ideas that I don’t believe nobody has, and I’m trying to push forward from them. Not for money, not for fame, just because of a goddamned stubborn streak. If I dig a shaft, I like to have something to show for it. Is that enough for you, Mr. Adams?”
“Excellent account, Mr. Brophy. I’m going to make the first move here and divulge a portion of what I’ve found out. You see if it squares with what you know, and we’ll see where we are at the end.”
“Go to work, sir,” Swagger said.
“All right, here’s my story. I am always looking for subjects for the next book. Some months ago I got interested, quite innocently, in the life and career of a great but tragic American shooter named Lon Scott–”
Swagger’s eyes stayed modestly interested, his breathing smooth, his lips unlicked. He gave away nothing and made certain not to choose this moment to break off eye contact and take a sip of coffee.
“Lon Scott. Interesting fellow,” Adams continued. Then he went ahead to issue the specifics on Lon Scott, the bright youth, the safari heroics, the football stardom at New Haven, the extraordinary run of national match successes in the years after World War II, the tragic accident in ’55 at the hands of his father, his father’s suicide, his reemergence as a writer and experimenter in the late fifties, and then his own death in 1964.
“Sad story,” said Bob as at last Marty had to take a breath and left a gap in the noise. “I hate it when someone so talented gets cut down young. Fella had a lot more to contribute.”
“Yes, it does seem so,” Adams said. “Then I made another interesting discovery.”
He went on to tell how, in the early seventies, a fellow named John Thomas Albright emerged as a gun writer and ballistics authority and soon became a revered if mysterious figure in gun culture. He had an excellent career until he was killed in a hunting accident in 1993, at the age of sixty-eight. “I learned by accident that he was also disabled, wheelchair-bound. You’d never know it from his writing. I checked for pictures, and none existed that I could find. I went to Albright’s home in rural North Carolina and learned that he was a mystery there as well. I began to wonder: could Albright and Scott be the same fellow? If so, why would Lon contrive his own fraudulent death in 1964 and reemerge as John Thomas Albright? What was he hiding or hoping to distance himself from?”
The question hung unanswered for a moment or two, and Bob glanced at the grim countenance of Richard, the third member of the group, and then answered. “I suppose you’re referring to our point of common interest, a certain event in November 1963.”
Adams, versed in upping the dramatic ante on his tale, paused an artful second or so, then nodded. He waited another second.
“Of course. So I decided to look into the life of these two men more carefully. I discovered that while, obviously, Lon Scott never published an article after 1964, John Thomas Albright never published one before 1964. I acquired copies of all their articles and first by myself and then with the help of an academic who specializes in forensic reading, we made a line-by-line comparison and found deep organizational similarities as well as dozens of turns of phrase that were similar. I found three cases where Albright made reference to discoveries that Scott had made as if they were his own. I discovered that the documentation on Scott’s death was very, very thin, as if contrived by an amateur. I could go on with the irregularities, but the point is obvious: Lon became John. The question is, why?”
“You’re in areas I haven’t even gotten to yet,” said Swagger. “You’re coming at it from a different angle. See, I’m on the how. The way an engineer’s mind works, there’s no point in proceeding until the how is answered. But you’ve started on, or you’ve advanced to, the who.”
“You can see what I need,” said Adams. “I need that how. Just like you need the who. So what I’m looking for, basically, is a theory. It’s one thing to put together a biography full of mysterious elements that might circumspectly suggest that Lon Scott, a great rifleman and ballistic experimenter, was involved in the Kennedy assassination to some degree. But a lot of people, if the data is manipulated and selected carefully enough, could fit in a similar template. What I need is somebody of extreme capability to put together a coherent narrative, based on what I can uncover about Lon Scott in 1963, as to the how part of his engagement. Where would he shoot from? What would he use? How would he get in and out? Who helped him? Remember, he’s in a wheelchair, so he needed allies. Here’s a provocative fact: I learned that he had a first cousin named Hugh Meachum who was some kind of CIA star at the time. He too died in 1993. But the connection of Lon and Hugh in 1963, if it can be documented, is titillating. But see, it’s all meaningless without that first part. How did they do it?”
“You don’t have any idea?”
“Well,” said Marty smugly, “I can’t reveal how I know this yet, but there is some suggestion that another rifle is involved, and it was a Model 70 Winchester. It’s more than Lon’s engagement over the years with Winchester. I’m talking about a specific Model 70, caliber as yet unknown. I got to thinking: what could you do to either a Model 70 Winchester or a Mannlicher-Carcano to make them compatible? Somehow interchange parts? Take the barrel off one and–”
“Trust me,” said Bob, “you are now in my pea patch, and there is a way of doing just that. That’s where my thinking is taking me. I’m looking at some kind of deal where a .264-caliber bullet from a Carcano shell was fired from a .264-caliber casing, say .264 Win Mag, 6.5 Swede, maybe a wildcat like a .30-06/6.5, in order to get enough velocity so the brain-shot bullet self-destructed.”
“Excellent,” said Marty. “Oh, this is so exciting.”
“There’s an issue of timing, but the reloading angle is interesting. And you say you can link it to a Model 70? That would really tie the bow on it.”
“That’s it,” Adams said. “I’m hoping the answers are in sync with the Warren Commission, not crazily opposed to it. You have to know the hard facts of the Warren Commission. And it all has to fit in that time frame. Nobody has ever come close to that.”
Swagger went all engineer on him, hard and practical. “I can see this might work. But what’s your pitch?” he asked. “What is it you want from me?”
Adams said, “Well, I’d like to hear your ideas, though, please understand, I’m not forcing you. Your theory is your intellectual property. I am not trying to pry it from you. You decide if you care to share somewhere along the line. What I am suggesting is that we explore working together. I’d get a lawyer to draw up a contract so that each of us is protected. I know you’re a cautious man. When you’re satisfied, we should have a working session and a frank exchange of evidence. I should also tell you – I alluded to this earlier – I may have a piece of evidence that could nail this absolutely. I won’t tell you what it is or where I got it, but
it could astound the world if it’s what I think it is.”
“Is it this mystery Model 70?”
“When I explain it to you, you’ll understand what I’m talking about. I can’t say more until we’ve signed contractually. I should add that I have a very good agent in New York, and we are talking about a book as the end product, are we not? I will write it, you will vet it. We may have to bring in another, better writer at some point, properly vetted and legally obligated by contract to us. Is this satisfactory?”
Swagger squinted hard. “I never move fast on anything. You have your lawyer draw up that contract, I’ll have mine look at it, and we will see where we are then.”
“That works for me,” said Adams.
“If that happens, I will settle down and write – I ain’t no writer, so ‘scratch out’ is a better term – all the stuff that comes out when I have a late-night thinking session. I think that will do better than any yakkity-yak session. You’ll see that it’s taking you where you think it should. We’ll proceed from there.”
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