“Crane is dirty? That’s bullshit!”
“Let’s just say that there’s a cloud. On Monday, two major papers, one in Philadelphia and one in Washington, will break stories about Bert Crane. The Philadelphia story will explore unsavory connections between Crane and various organized-crime figures that took place while he was a DA in Philly. He let a mobster named Johnny Serrano off on a corruption charge and sometime later there were contributions made to his campaign from a union known to be influenced by the Serrano crime family. The Washington story will focus on the operations of the committee staff. Apparently a good deal of money has been spent without legal authorization, and the comptroller general is starting an investigation.”
Stunned, Karp paused a moment before responding, aware that the other man was examining his reaction. “That’s ridiculous!” he said at last. “Crane never did any deal with mob guys. And the only money that’s been spent is on essential items for the office. What, they think he’s ripping off paper clips?”
“That’s not the point. It is a fact of political life that you can survive accusations if you have a strong political base, or, if you have a weak base you can survive by ensuring that no accusations are made against you—as I said, by making the necessary people happy. But Crane has made people angry without a political base, and that’s fatal.”
“I can’t believe this,” replied Karp stubbornly.
“For the sake of argument, then, assume he’ll be forced out. The question I wanted to raise with you, Butch, has to do with your position.”
“My position?”
“Yes. Assuming Bert has to go.”
“Well, obviously, I hadn’t thought about it. I don’t agree that Bert’s going.”
Harrison waved a dismissive hand. “Yes, yes, very loyal, of course, but let’s cut the crap. Crane is finished and the only problem that remains is who replaces him. I think you’d be ideal. No—let me finish. One, you’re as apolitical as a lamppost. That’s essential. The report the committee writes is going to have to be salable to the public at large and that means no detectable political influence. Two, I’ve checked you out pretty thoroughly, and I’ve been unable to find a cloud. In fact, on several occasions you’ve dug up nasty stuff that could’ve been used to good advantage in building a career for yourself and you haven’t used any of it. Very commendable, and useful in the present case. Incorruptibility is a salable commodity in this town, but it’s as perishable as oysters. It requires, let us say, a certain protective shield. Let’s say that I can arrange such a shield.”
“I don’t understand,” said Karp, and he meant it.
“What I mean is that Crane’s job is yours, if you want it. If we can come to some understanding.”
“Which would be what?”
Harrison checked and grinned and fanned his hand in front of his face. “My God, such frankness! It takes my breath away. Okay, I’ll be blunt, as much as it violates my sensibilities. You take Crane’s job. I’ll use my influence and the influence of people who owe me favors to make sure you get it. I will ensure cover for you in the press while you do your work. In return, you will provide me with a first look at everything you turn up. Also, if you’re as smart as you seem to be, you’d also accept such political guidance as I may offer from time to time. How is that? Blunt enough?”
“Yeah. Tell me, you’re a reporter—how come you can offer political guidance?”
Harrison laughed at that. “How? My friend, you might as well ask how a telephone can transmit stock market tips. I am a conduit for powerful people. They tell me things. I tell them things. Everyone knows that, which is why my column gets read, and why it’s influential. It’s the way this town works, as I’m sure you’ll find out, if you survive. So—what do you say?”
“I say I’ll think about it.”
Harrison nodded his cube of a head several times. “Good. But don’t take too long. The train is pulling out of the station and those who aren’t on it will be left behind.”
Karp was tired of this sort of advice. He said, “Well, Blake, the fact is that I really don’t give two shits about whether I’m on the train or not. I came here to find out what the truth was about the Kennedy assassination, which is a legal and forensic investigation, a job that, with all due respect, I don’t need any advice from you about. If I can do that, fine. If I can’t, for whatever reason, I’m out of here.”
Harrison rolled his eyes and brought his fist angrily down on his knee. “The truth! Yes, of course you want the truth. Don’t you think that’s what I want too? I was in Dallas when Jack was shot. I was at Parkland when they brought him in with his brains spilling out of his head. Nobody ever forgets something like that. My point, if you’d care to listen, is that without some experienced political guidance and some cover, you will not get to the truth. You will not be allowed to. So the choice I put to you is whether you want to remain a ‘legal and forensic’ choirboy with an unsullied heart, and get kicked out on your ass, or whether you want to play this game and win. Let me know when you make up your mind which.”
He rose from his chair and stalked out of the room, leaving Karp sitting there thinking about what Clay Fulton had said those many weeks ago: indeed, he was way over his head. And in muddy water too.
After vomiting copiously in a primrose yellow toilet, Marlene washed her face, dried herself on one of the charming flowered guest towels, and went looking for a place to lie low until the wretched party had reached its end and she could sneak out.
She walked away from the sound of well-informed conversation, down a darkened hallway and through a door. She found herself in an echoing room with tall windows and a flagstoned floor, smelling oddly of both earth and chlorine. The windows on the left side were lit, those to the right, dark. To the right, then, obviously a pool; to the left a greenhouse, or, she supposed one should say, a conservatory. There was a door and she went through it.
The room was large, about fifty by thirty feet, and had one wall all of glass, which by night threw back the reflection of the overhead fluorescents and the variously shaded greens of the plants, mingled with the brighter hues of their blossoms. There were large specimens of the usual indoor plants—impatiens and prayer plants and tradescantia—but also more exotic growth. Huge staghorn ferns hung from the sprinkler pipe supports. Ficus and hibiscuses, oleanders and eucalypts grew from pots, and there were tables covered with weird aloes, and euphorbias and other fleshy, striped and waxy-flowered items that Marlene could not identify. A faint scent of jasmine floated over the bass note of the moist earth.
She saw a flash of a remarkable lavender color through the dense branches of a large croton and went around a potting table to see what it was. The plant was in a pot on the floor. It had dark green shiny leaves like a rhodie, but its flowers looked like giant purple pansies. She poked under its branches to see whether there was a label.
Behind her a voice said, “It’s Brunfelsia floribunda, from Brazil.”
Marlene jumped back six inches and whirled, startled. Maggie Dobbs was sitting on a low green wooden bench in an alcove made by a pair of potting tables.
“It’s lovely,” said Marlene, recovering her composure. “Do you, um, do all this?” she asked, gesturing to the conservatory.
“Yup. Me and Manuel the gardener. I have a green thump. Thumb.” She held up her hand with the thumb sticking out. The fingers, Marlene saw, were wrapped around a squat brown bottle. Maggie looked at the bottle as if she had just noticed its attachment to her hand. “Want a drink? It’s B and B.”
“Um, I think I had enough already tonight, thanks. As I’m sure you observed. I have to apologize… .”
“Nah! Life of the party. It was worth it to see the expression on that jerk Jim Royce’s face when you started talking about fucking corpses. Oops! Excuse my French!” She placed her hand over her mouth and giggled. Marlene wondered how long she had been hiding from her own party behind the potted plants. Apparently, and contradicting her previous t
hinking, the ability to give nice parties was not a perfect recipe for the good life.
“Mind if I join you?” Marlene asked.
“Sit,” said Maggie, and she took a swig from her bottle. There were two bars of hectic red across her cheeks and her blue eyes were bleary, but aside from this, she still looked neat and doll-like in her golden hostess costume. Marlene did not want to think about her own appearance; she thought she had removed all of the vomit from her hair. Some people are neat from the core out, she decided, of which happy company Marlene was not a member.
Marlene leaned back against the wall behind the bench, drew out her Marlboros, and lit one.
“Oooh! Ciggies! Thank God!”
“You want one?”
“God, yes! I’m quitting.”
On impulse, Marlene finger-palmed the cigarette and used a standard sleight-of-hand production, seeming to pluck it out of thin air with a snap of her fingers.
“Yikes!” cried Maggie. “Do that again!”
Grinning, Marlene hummed an upbeat version of “Tea for Two” and did a little routine of vanishes, acquitments, and productions using her own lit cigarette.
“That’s terrific!” Maggie screamed. “How did you learn to do that?”
“I had a lot of time to practice. A physical therapist I had after I got blown up thought it was a good way to strengthen my hands.” She held up her hand and wiggled the mutilated fingers.
“Blown up?” Maggie said, her eyes widening.
“Yeah, by a letter bomb.”
“Oh, God, she was blown up, she knows corpse fuckers, she does magic… .” She hung her head and her golden Dutch boy covered her face. “I’m so dull I could scream.”
“Well, I’m dull too, now, invisible, in fact, at least according to what’s-his-face—that Royce asshole. Wife-of-hood.”
“Yeah, he treats me like I was Twiggy, only not as socially valuable.”
“Well, at least you’re dull and rich,” said Marlene. “It beats being dull and poor.” It was a cruel thing to say, and Marlene immediately regretted saying it.
Maggie let out a wail. “I know! I’m so ashamed! I have everything and most people have nothing and I’m still miserable. And, of course, even saying that makes me feel even more ashamed. I have a marvelous husband and two marvelous children. There’s no end to it.” A fat tear plopped onto her cheek.
“Well, I’m miserable too,” said Marlene, thinking once again of the first conversation she had had that day with a cigarette-bumming woman on a bench, and what she had concluded from it, “but I’m damned if I’m going to be maudlin. Come on, fuck ’em all! We’ll join the … Wife-Of Self-Defense Association.”
Maggie gave her a long unfocused look. “Is there one?”
“I think we just formed it. You can be the first president.”
“No,” said Maggie instantly. “You be the first president. I have to be the secretary.”
That started them giggling. Marlene exclaimed, “I love it! It’s even got a good acronym. WOSDA.”
“Yeah,” said Maggie, “as in ‘Darling, WOSDA matter with you now?”
By the time Karp tracked Marlene down, an hour or so later, they were still laughing like banshees, clinging to each other on the green bench, the empty bottle stashed behind a potted oleander.
Bishop visited the house in Little Havana over the weekend. The thin man was watching golf on television when he strode in.
“Interested in a little work?” Bishop asked.
“No, I like sitting on my ass watching golf,” said the thin man sourly.
“Jerry James Depuy,” said Bishop, “may have become a tiny problem.”
“I thought he was dead.”
“Yeah, he’s dead. His works have apparently outlived him. Apparently some ex-cop was asking questions of the widow. It turns out this guy works for the House committee on contract. She told him that she’d given all his stuff to the AP and they’d given it to Georgetown U. for their Kennedy archive.”
“So? Aside from that bullshit with Ferrie, he didn’t know dick.”
“Yes, well, we always knew Ferrie was one of the weak links. Secrecy was not his strong suit. He liked to brag. The point is, it turns out that among the material passed on to the archive were several spools of eight-millimeter film.”
The thin man looked away from the TV for the first time. He stared straight into Bishop’s eyes. “I got that film, if that’s what you’re thinking. When Ferrie went down.”
“Yes, you did, the original reels. But film can be copied. It’s entirely possible that the little asshole showed the film to Depuy and Depuy copied it. I went to the archive myself the other day and found that the committee staff had already grabbed Depuy’s material.”
“But you don’t know that the film they have is Ferrie’s film.”
“No, I don’t,” Bishop agreed. “But the possibility is extremely disturbing. We’re going to be busy people if a copy survived. And if the people looking at it understand what it means.”
TEN
“What else did you find besides this film?” asked Karp, as V.T. threaded the Moviola editor in the dim room.
“Some notebooks, mainly concerned with Depuy’s coverage of Garrison’s prosecution of Clay Shaw, lots of clippings of same, the original manuscripts of his filed stories, an address book. Notes for a book on Ferrie and the New Orleans right-wing scene that never got past the interview stage. Like that.”
“Anything there?”
“I haven’t really scoured it, to be honest. This film hit me in the eye right away and I’ve been looking at it ever since.”
After threading the film, V.T. cranked the handle for about fifteen seconds, taking up film until a piece of yellow paper popped out of the spool and fluttered to the floor. Then he switched on the screen light.
“It’s show time,” he said, and began to crank the Moviola. Karp leaned forward in his chair and concentrated. The small square screen showed a shadowy landscape, some bushes and trees, then a road. The film was black-and-white and grainy, or perhaps the graininess was just an artifact of the ground-glass screen of the editing machine. In any case, the film seemed to have been shot in bad light, at dusk perhaps, or in moonlight.
The camera panned across dark woods that seemed vaguely tropical—palmettos, Spanish moss, and hanging vines—past an open field, and onto the road again. A line of two-and-a-half-ton military trucks appeared, moving slowly, their headlights cut to thin slits. The trucks stopped and soldiers leaped out and lined up on the road. They were dressed in fatigues and soft caps. Most carried rifles, but there were some with machine guns and mortar components, and Karp spotted one with a folded bazooka.
The film now cut jerkily to maneuvers: the soldiers rushed across the field and flung themselves down, while others provided covering fire. The film was silent, but you could see the pinpoints of fire from the rifles and the shimmering gouts of muzzle blast from the machine guns. It cut to a mortar team firing, dropping the shells in odd silence down the tubes and shielding their ears from the blasts. Karp was no expert, but they seemed well drilled.
“Where is this happening, V.T.? And what’s the point?”
“Patience. Aren’t you interested in how we trained all the brave anticommunist Cubans?”
“Is that what this is? The Bay of Pigs?”
V.T. stopped cranking. “No, they trained those in Guatemala; this is Louisiana, and if we assume that the film was processed shortly after it was taken, from the markings on the leader it’s the early summer of 1963. It’s an illegal operation.”
“How do you know where it is?” Karp asked.
“Watch.”
V.T. started the film moving again. Now the camera was obviously in a vehicle of some kind, an open vehicle because the camera could pan around 360 degrees. A jeep: the well-known square hood flashed by and then the backs of the heads of two men with military caps on. A white road sign loomed up and started to whip by. V.T. stopped the movemen
t again. The road sign had the shape of Louisiana and a number.
“We know just where this is, right by Lake Pontchartrain, near New Orleans. Okay, this part is important.” He cranked slowly. The jeep ride ended and the camera cut to a group of five men standing around a jeep, talking, as troops filed by in the background. V.T. froze a frame and pointed with a pencil.
“Okay, these two guys look like Cubans, we haven’t identified them yet. This stocky guy with the round face is Antonio Veroa, of Brigada Sixty-one fame—the star of document A. The tall, ugly guy here is Gary Becker, the head of the Anti-Communist League of the Caribbean.”
“Who’s the other guy in civilian clothes?” asked Karp, indicating a tall man with dark hair, a prominent nose, and deeply impressed wrinkles under his eyes. He was turning away from the lens as the shot opened, as if more interested in some background object than in the conversation the men were having; that, or he had a predisposition to avoid being the subject of photography.
V.T. said, “Also a blank. It’s a little hard to ID him because he’s turning away like that. Now watch this.”
He edged the film forward. In the treacly movements of slow motion, the camera’s view moved to another group of men standing by a truck. One of the men in the group turned around and smiled at the camera. It was actually more of a smirk than a smile, the famous smirk.
“Holy shit!” said Karp. “It’s him.”
“So it seems,” said V.T. “Perhaps a sort of private ROTC weekend away from the lovely Marina, or maybe this was during the time he was actually living in New Orleans.”
Karp was looking at the other men in the group around Lee Harvey Oswald. “Who are they?”
“It’d be nice to find out. I’ll have portrait blowups made of every identifiable face in this film and get my people on it. But there’s more.”
Corruption of Blood Page 17