by M. S. Karl
“Did you go to see where Kennedy was shot?”
“I—no.”
“Lástima. I went there when I was in the States a couple of years ago. I went to Dealy Plaza and walked by the Texas School Book Depository.” The cigar smoke hung in the air like an ominous cloud, and Obregon slowly came forward until he was leaning on his desk with his elbows. “Do you think that Oswald killed President Kennedy?”
Because somewhere, deep down, I knew the whole story, my answer was automatic, “Who else could have?”
He coughed. “You will forgive me. This is a matter of idle curiosity, no more. People still wonder, verdad? I am one of them.” He chuckled nervously and began to pick at a rough fingernail. “Some say it was the Cubans. You are from Washington—”
“But I have no inside information.” What the hell did the man want? What was he getting at? He gave me an open smile.
“Of course. I understand. But I thought perhaps you had an opinion. Particular—private, I mean.”
“I think it was Oswald,” I said.
“Ah. Precisely. He was, then, crazy? Or was there another motive?”
“He seems to have been a very strange person. I think the psychiatrists testified that he had a childhood that made him liable to that sort of crime. A hatred of authority.”
“The psiquiatras, yes. His mother drove him to it, his father was a weak figure in his childhood, that sort of thing.” He swung around again to look down at the plaza. “A very bizarre business. But perhaps any one of them could do that, verdad? Or any one of us—why be restrictive? That was what I was thinking when you came in. Do you agree with me, Señor Dennison?”
I shrugged. Where the hell was he going? And why did I suddenly recall it all so easily? He stubbed out his cigar in the ash tray.
“No. Well, I have been wondering something for a long time. About this Oswald. Like yourself, I think he was the single author of the crime. I have made something of a study of it in my spare time.” He reached into his desk, rummaged, and came out with a dog-eared paperback copy of the Warren Commission’s summary. Gravely, he laid it on the desk. “I have read every page. More than once. And most of the major works criticizing it. Mark Lane, Garrison, the others—well, not all, but most. There are too many. And I must struggle with the English. It is because it was a truly great crime. It was great because it killed a great person. President Kennedy was deeply loved here, Señor Dennison. He is regarded as a martyr today. He was a man—muy hombre. So I have become more than ordinarily interested in his death. And I believe the facts indicate that Oswald was the murderer. I believe that as much as I believe in God or his Santa Madre. But—” he held up his right hand as if he were commanding traffic to halt—“I do not believe he was the only killer. His was only the finger that pulled the trigger that sent two fatal bullets into Kennedy’s body. But there were others behind him. Others more guilty than he.”
All my senses were alert now, and I wondered if he saw my muscles tensing. He went on.
“But the question is: who these people, the puppet masters, these manipulators of Oswald, were. I have my own opinion, but then who am I? I am a teniente de policia, no more. I am isolated from all that really happens. Down here, the crimes we get are two whores knifing each other, a tourist whose pocket gets picked. Well, an occasional murder. But you can see why, when I have the good fortune of getting to talk with a person who may know more than I …”
“I’m afraid I can’t help you. But, tell me, what do you think these manipulators did?”
“I believe he was brainwashed, Señor Dennison.” He gave a deprecatory laugh. “It is not a new theory, I know. But I am led to it by the evidence. Tell me, do you believe-that it is possible for a man to be so completely conditioned by others that when they finish with him he will do anything they ask?”
“Like in The Manchurian Candidate?”
“Pardon?”
“A book I once read.” But when? In college in the Midwest? Vietnam? Mexico?
The lieutenant went on, his dark eyes passionate now. The knife scar was livid on his right cheek. “There are certain ways to interrogate a man. Ways that are used here. Ways to extract confessions and information through pain. That is because we have never learned the way to extract information without the use of pain. But it is possible. We both know that. Keeping a man for days in isolation. Or injection with drugs. A certain piece of music played over and over. Or a pattern of lights. Could not a man with a weak ego, such as Oswald, have been subjected to that?”
“By whom? Who would have wanted Kennedy dead?”
There was a silence, and I felt the muscles in my jaw aching the Lieutenant’s hand hit the desk with a thump. “The Russians, of course. For what Kennedy did to them in Cuba.”
“I think Oswald was in Russia a long time before the missile crisis.”
“Certainly. But they could have implanted certain suggestions, verdad? To be activated later on if the need arose.”
“I guess it’s possible,” I said.
“Well, it is what I believe.” He stood up, stretched his joints, and then put a hand on my shoulder. “You will forgive me if I talk too much. The whole business here has depressed you, I can tell. I’m afraid my strange ideas have only added to it.”
“I’ll be fine,” I said.
“Do you want to see him now?”
I had a quick picture of the man in the cell, waiting for my visit, wondering. It was my duty to go.
“No,” I said. “Not this morning. I’m very tired.”
It wasn’t a lie, I thought, fighting weariness as I made my way down the steps to the first floor. It had taken me a long time to go to sleep, and when I finally slept, my dreams were tormented again. In my dreams I had died, my burnt corpse lying on a white metal table with white-masked doctors bending over me with scalpels and forceps. But I was not really the body on the table, swathed in a sheet. That was another me. I was the line on the oscilloscope, a line that vibrated with decreasing regularity until finally it jumped and flattened out, not to move again. One of the doctors looked at it, then the other doctors put down their instruments, and there was a general sigh. And somewhere, hovering outside of it all, was my spirit, cursing their fatalism and telling them to restart the machines, crying out that I was alive, not to abandon me just because of the line on a machine.
If I did not go to see Bassett, then I would have to go somewhere else. But where? I wondered, stepping out into the sunlit street and passing a woman with a Mongoloid child, who squatted on the pavement asking for handouts. Time was short. It was worse than short; it was gone. I felt worse now than I ever had. Everything had closed around me, like a convoluted warp in space, twisting and wrapping me in folds of nothingness. My sole accomplishment was a woman in a hospital, and I still had no answers to anything. Why did I care? Was it because not to care would be to make myself like him?
Here, in a sun-scorched, marshland city of thousands, something was stalking. It had caught LaCour, it had caught Bassett, and it had caught Gloria Peón, and now it was stalking me. I did not know what it was, but I could feel it almost as tangibly as I could smell the scent of exhaust fumes in the air or the scent of bananas in the market as I passed. It was a sinister force that seeped out of the ground like the morning mist from the river. It would find me, too.
But I was still surprised when the Landrover stopped beside me and the voice told me to get in.
PART TWO
Chapter Eight
I did not recognize the voice at first. But I saw the door swing open and I obeyed. The Rover started again before I could shut the door and raced through a stop sign into the boulevard. Laurie Whitcomb’s face was no longer that of a beguiling half-child. Her mouth was set in a hard line, and her eyes, hidden by sunglasses, looked straight ahead. Five minutes later we crossed the bridge and were on the blacktop road that held the memory of death. But we did not go far. A few miles out we turned right, up toward the jungled hills, on a road
that was a black thread that finally lost itself in a carpet of green hanging against the blue sky.
“Where are we going?”
She did not reply, just pushed the gas pedal further in, and I saw the speedometer needle hovering at 120—over seventy miles an hour. We whipped past a slow-moving jeep and began a gradual climb. We were leaving the hot, low, coastal plain behind and were entering a domain of isolated ranches, cut off from the rest of the world by the hills, which mounted like waves into the Chiapas highlands—the remotest corner of Mexico.
There was a thin coating of dust on my arm and my mouth was dry. Her hair, once straw-colored, was plastered down in strings and had turned the muddy color of the river. Her face was unreadable, and I decided to settle back and wait until she decided to tell me where we were going and why.
It took half an hour. We wound up through the first foothills, past jungle trees leaning over, and left the blacktop for a gravel stretch that turned down into a little valley. In all the time we had been driving we passed a jeep and two trucks, and now we came abreast of a man and a woman, slogging down the road in the patient, dogged way of Indians, the man bent under a tumpline and the woman two steps behind, carrying the baby. Their eyes followed us for a few seconds and then went back to their own eternal world and the temporary meeting of two sets of lives dissolved in a dust cloud.
We were climbing again and this time the morning shadows were reaching out from the sides of the road to grab us. We banked around a curve, and she went into second gear, then first. The jungle was all around us now, and I heard bird calls and saw butterflies dancing in the light streams. We came to the top of the rise and, as we started into the dip below, I saw a dirt trail that someone had cut into the forest at the bottom of the depression. The brakes of the Landrover froze and gravel sprayed behind us. Without coming to a full stop, she eased the Rover onto the path and for another minute we slowly made our way through ruts and around fallen limbs. When the main road could no longer be seen behind us, she cut the engine, and pulled out the brake. Suddenly there was silence.
“Get out,” she commanded.
“Why?”
“Because I don’t want to have to clean the upholstery.” She let her hand dip into the leather purse beside the gearshift and when it reappeared it was holding a .38. It was too much gun for such a little girl, but it only took one good reflex pull at this range. She emphasized the fact by cocking it. “It’s loaded with magnums.”
I got out. She followed, opening her door carefully and then motioning me away from the car. The revolver weighed almost three pounds and it took both her hands to keep it level, but the way she held it, I got the feeling she had used it before.
“Now what?” I asked, conscious of the big bore of the gun.
“Now talk. What were you doing at LaCour’s house? What do you want here? How did Gloria get hurt?
“So it was you,” I said, my hand touching my sore head almost unconsciously. “You’re the one who slugged me at LaCour’s and then almost ran me down. But it wasn’t your car—”
“I borrowed the car from Gloria because the Rover was in the shop. But never mind that. Just tell me about Gloria. How did she get on that road at that time of night?”
“How should I know?”
Obregon had said he’d keep me out of it. If Laurie knew, it could only be because she’d seen me leaving after Gloria. And if she had seen me leaving, then it must have been because she had business in my room.
“Don’t play games with me. Just answer the question. And remember, Gloria is a good friend.”
“It’s simple. She was running.”
“From you?”
“In a sense. Really from LaCour. From the pictures.”
“You know about the pictures?” Her voice had dropped to a whisper and there was a fatalism in it I didn’t like.
“Yes. As you must know, there were pictures of her.”
“Gloria? I don’t believe it. You’re lying. I ought to kill you now.”
“It’s true. I thought she had hit me, that maybe she was the one who had killed LaCour. So I asked her. It triggered her flight reflex. She thought I was trying to blackmail her and went into a panic.”
“And you weren’t interested in the pictures for blackmail?” Her voice was sarcastic.
“No. I want to find out if Harold Bassett is guilty. Aside from that, I don’t care about who sleeps with whom.”
“You don’t care if some of the most prominent families in Tabasco are destroyed?”
“I don’t know anything about that. I just want to see that an innocent man isn’t convicted.”
“Do you know him?”
“Not well.”
“And you think he’s worth that many other lives?”
“I don’t know. Probably not. But there’s something else involved.”
“Who sent you?”
“Nobody.”
It was the second mistake I had made today. The first had been letting her pick me up. Now I had stimulated her fear centers, and I could hear her breath quickening behind me.
“Straight ahead,” she said.
I took a couple of steps and then stopped. “There’s nothing but jungle,” I protested.
“That’s right.”
“Can’t we talk this over?” The only ones who would ever find me here would be the archaeologists. In a hundred years. Provided the animals left any of my bones.
“Walk,” she said.
I put up a hand to guard my face from the branches.
“Keep going.”
I tried to gauge her distance behind me. No good, though. The thorns were already pricking at my arms and legs. They were steel barbs, ready to rake me into an embrace if I tried to whirl. And by then I would be dead. I plucked the last one from my pants and tried to see which was the best way to go forward. There was an opening between two trees. Her steps halted, and I figured she was in the briars now. You couldn’t pass through them without lowering your eyes for an instant. I let my hand touch a branch, bend it slightly. It was my only chance. I started forward again just as I heard her feet crush the jungle floor.
“Go on,” she called from three feet behind I nodded, took two steps forward, and let the branch whip back. At the same time I spun and heard a little cry of surprise. The branch missed her but it deflected the barrel of the gun.
The forest crashed with the explosion and a bell went off in my ears. The bullet went off through the undergrowth and a cloud of birds took wing in alarm, showering us with twigs and leaves. I grabbed the barrel before she could fire again and wrenched upward. The motion knocked her off balance and sent her backward into the briars. She let go of the gun as she fell, and suddenly I was holding it and looking down at her on a bed of thorns. For a long moment there was nothing in her eyes but surprise. I put the gun in my belt and bent down to pluck the thorn branches off her blouse and blue jeans. My body was inches from hers and our faces were a breath apart. Now the terror was plain and the corner of her mouth began to tremble. I gave her my hand to help her up, but felt her recoil. For a long time she lay on the leaves, her frightened eyes on mine.
“I’m not going to hurt you,” I said, “and as for sex, well, it’s just too damned hot.”
I turned away and walked back to the car. As I bent to get in I saw her emerge from the foliage. I started the motor and reached over to open the door on the passenger side. Without a word she got in, brushing her hair back out of her face with one hand. She watched me take the gun from my belt, swing out the cylinder, and eject the shells into my hand. Then I put them in my shirt pocket and the gun on the seat between us. Now I remembered the second set of pictures, the ones of the blond girl.
“You were victimized by him, too,” I said.
Suddenly her body convulsed and she began to cry with a force that rocked her body. I reached over and brought her against me. If she had told the truth yesterday about her having arrived only a couple of days ago, she could not have k
illed LaCour. Her muscles quivered as I touched her, and I sensed that it would take little for her to spring away.
“It wasn’t fair,” she said. “He raped me. And then he threatened to send pictures if I talked.”
“And keeping it secret was worth murder?”
“It was worth anything.” She looked at me pathetically. “You don’t know my mother. She’d never forget.”
“When did it happen?”
“Just over two years ago. It did something to me.” She shivered. “My mother never knew what it was all about, why I changed, I mean. I saw a psychiatrist here. Finally he suggested I should go off to school. I would have anyway.”
“And did it work?”
“I thought so. But every time a man touches me—it’s hell. You couldn’t know what it’s like.”
I let her go and started to back the vehicle down the narrow trail. We came out on the main road and I put it into gear.
“I’m sure it’ll pass,” I said and saw her bite her lip. “In the meantime, I don’t have any intention of raking up your past. But there are important things at stake.”
“You mean the man in jail?”
“Yes. Don’t you think so?”
“You ask me that when I just tried to kill you? Yes, yes, of course it’s important—when somebody else’s involved. But right now I’m just trying to survive. I wish I could be more generous.”
I felt sorry for her and told myself the emotion was too dangerous to indulge. “Do you have the negatives?”
“Oh, God.” Her face went ashen. “I’d so hoped you’d found the goddamn things—that it was over. No. All I got was what was in the camera. I thought maybe they were in a manila envelope. That’s why I searched your room last night.”
“You’d have only gotten positives. And I had them with me.”
“Then it isn’t over yet. Have you asked Bassett? Maybe he hid them somewhere.”
“Possibly, but I doubt it. I’ve been through his house.” I didn’t tell her what a light search it was. There was still another possibility or two that I wanted to follow up. “Anyway, like I said, I don’t think he’s guilty. Which leaves only one place to look—the person who did kill LaCour.”